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Stewed Brisket of Beef, a LA Flamande

A slow‑cooked beef brisket stewed with carrots, onions, celery, herbs, and spices, finished with a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Brisket of Beef, a LA Flamande

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the brisket of beef, removing the breast-bone and rough parts.

  2. Place the brisket in a large pot.

  3. Garnish the brisket with carrots, onion, celery, parsley, green onions, thyme, bay leaf, cloves, and mace.

  4. Add enough broth to cover the beef.

Simmer

  1. Bring the broth to a gentle boil.

  2. Simmer for about 5 hours until tender.

  3. Drain the brisket.

Glaze and serve

  1. Place the brisket on a baking sheet.

  2. Pour a little broth under the brisket.

  3. Glaze the brisket.

  4. Dry the brisket in the oven.

  5. Glaze the brisket again.

  6. Serve the brisket on a dish garnished with tinned carrots, turnips, Brussels sprouts, and glazed onions.

  7. Sauce the beef with Espagnole sauce before serving.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef brisket
Long gentle simmering turns the tough connective tissue tender and moist.
Broth
Cooks the beef gently and keeps it moist while it simmers.
Carrots
Add aromatic sweetness and flavour to the cooking liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and sweetness to the broth as it cooks.
Espagnole sauce
Adds a rich, glossy brown sauce that complements the beef.

The step that matters

Simmer for about 5 hours until tender. Keeping the broth at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets collagen in the brisket slowly break down into gelatin, so the meat becomes tender without drying out or toughening.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, thyme, clove):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, thyme, clove. 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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