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Beef and Mushrooms

A beef fillet stuffed with bacon, parsley, and shallot, simmered in tomato sauce and served with fried mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef and Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillet

  1. Trim the fillet of beef into shape.

  2. Roll the bacon with parsley, shallot, and pepper.

  3. Make a lengthwise incision in the fillet. Insert the bacon into the incision.

  4. Tie the fillet with string.

Brown and simmer

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan. Brown the fillet.

  2. Mix tomato sauce with a little gravy. Add the mixture to the fillet.

  3. Simmer for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Place the meat on a hot dish. Remove the string.

  2. Garnish with fried mushrooms and parsley. Pour the sauce over the meat. Serve.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Fillet of beef
Forms the main cut that is browned and slowly simmered until tender.
Bacon
Adds fat and salty, savoury flavour that seasons the meat from within.
Tomato sauce
Provides acidity and body for the sauce that surrounds the simmered meat.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sweet onion-like aroma to the bacon and parsley filling.

The step that matters

Browning the fillet. Searing the outside in hot butter before simmering creates browned flavour through the Maillard reaction. Skipping or rushing this leaves the sauce and meat tasting flat.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, shallot, pepper, butter, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, shallot, pepper, butter, sauce, mushroom. 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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