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Or Make Beef Bouilli

A boiled beef dish with carrots, turnip, onions, and a ketchup-floured gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Or Make Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the beef

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the beef and brown it on all sides.

  3. Remove the beef.

  4. Place two or three skewers in the bottom of the pan.

  5. Return the beef to the pan to prevent sticking.

Stew the beef

  1. Add hot water and sliced onions.

  2. Cover the pan.

  3. Stew slowly for about 2 hours until the beef is tender.

  4. Remove the beef.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with flour mixed with ketchup, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cut the boiled carrot and turnip into shapes. Add them to the gravy.

  3. Boil everything together for a few minutes.

  4. Serve in a hash dish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Slow stewing turns the tough cut tender and gives the dish its main body.
Flour
Starch swells in the hot liquid and thickens the gravy.
Onions
Soften during stewing and add sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Butter
Fat for browning the beef, building colour and flavour on its surface.
Ketchup
Adds acidity and sweetness to the thickened gravy.

The step that matters

Stew slowly until the beef is tender. Tough connective tissue in brisket or rump only breaks down into tender gelatin with long, gentle simmering. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can leave the gravy cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ketchup, carrot, turnip, butter, beef, flour, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ketchup, carrot, turnip, butter, beef, flour, pepper. 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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