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Fillet of Beef in Continental Style

Beef fillet steaks grilled and served with butter, parsley, and optional fried potatoes, watercress, or brown mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fillet of Beef in Continental Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the fillet steaks across to make them somewhat circular, trimming off loose pieces while leaving the fat.

  2. Flatten each steak to about half its original thickness using a meat mallet or wooden beater.

  3. Dip the steaks in tepid butter and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Grill the steaks over a brisk fire, turning frequently until they are underdone and juicy.

  2. Serve on a hot dish with a piece of butter sprinkled with chopped parsley in the center, garnished with fried potatoes or watercress seasoned with pepper, salt, and vinegar, or with brown mushroom sauce.

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 + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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 fillet steaks
Provides the tender, juicy meat that is the centerpiece of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and carries seasoning onto the surface of the steaks.

The step that matters

Grilling the steaks over a brisk fire. Searing over high heat browns the surface quickly while the interior stays juicy. Turning frequently helps prevent the outside from overcooking before the center reaches the underdone stage the recipe calls for.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, pepper, fried potato, watercress, vinegar, mushroom):

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Garlicfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, pepper, fried potato, watercress, vinegar, 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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