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Bouillie Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with turnips, carrots, and celery, served in separate dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bouillie Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Cut the thick end of a brisket of beef and place it in a kettle.

  2. Cover the beef with water and boil for 2 hours.

Stew the beef

  1. Reduce heat.

  2. Stew for 6 hours.

  3. Add water as needed.

  4. Add turnips, carrots, and celery to the kettle.

Make the soup and serve

  1. An hour before the meat is done, remove some broth to fill a soup dish.

  2. In the broth, boil turnips and carrots cut into small pieces for 1 hour.

  3. Season the soup with salt and pepper.

  4. Serve the beef in one dish and the soup in another.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

Brisket of beef
Long gentle stewing breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and enriching the broth.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add a mild, slightly sweet earthy flavor to the soup.
Carrots
Soften during simmering and release natural sugars, adding sweetness to the broth.
Celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic savory note to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Keep the stew at a gentle simmer for 6 hours. A hard boil toughens meat fibres and evaporates the broth too fast, while slow, low heat lets collagen convert to gelatin, yielding tender beef and a rich broth.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Turnipthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, 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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