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Pot-au-feu a LA Bordelaise

A slow‑cooked beef stew with bacon, garlic, and root vegetables, finished with a mustard‑vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot-au-feu a LA Bordelaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Lard the brisket of beef with bacon and garlic.

  2. Place the beef in a stewpan with water, onion, carrots, turnip, sweet herbs, celery, parsnip, peppercorns, and cloves.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew slowly for 4-5 hours until the meat is tender.

  2. Remove the meat and serve on a dish with a piquant sauce made from stock, mustard, vinegar, and roux to thicken.

  3. Serve the soup after straining, with vegetables or rice stewed in stock.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Roux
Flour and fat mixture that thickens the piquant sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, piquant flavor to the sauce served with the meat.
Carrots
Sweeten the stock as they soften during the long stew.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor to the lean beef as it is larded.

The step that matters

Slow stewing of the beef. Holding the stew at a gentle simmer over 4-5 hours lets collagen in the brisket break down into gelatin, which makes the meat tender and enriches the broth. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibers and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, garlic, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, parsnip):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, garlic, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, parsnip. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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