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Beef Boulli

A boiled beef served with a mushroom ketchup and mustard sauce, thickened with flour and fat, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Boulli

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the beef until done, then transfer it to an earthen pan, leaving behind the vegetables and seasoning.

  2. Strain the soup through a sieve over the beef and let it cool.

  3. Skim off the fat from the cooled soup.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix ½ pint of the soup with 2 tablespoons of mushroom ketchup and 1 teaspoon of mustard.

  2. Strain the soup again into a clean pot, add the diced carrots and turnips, and heat until hot.

  3. Alternatively, to thicken the soup, mix 2 tablespoons of the skimmed fat with 2 tablespoons of flour and stir into the soup over heat.

Serve

  1. Serve the beef garnished with parsley and the soup.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main protein and the meaty centre of the dish.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and a tender, soft texture to the soup.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture as they cook in the soup.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds a savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent note that balances the richness of the fat.
Flour
Swells with heat in the hot soup and thickens it into a sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the fat and flour into the hot soup. Flour lumps form if it is added without being mixed smoothly into the fat first. Stirring it into hot liquid lets the starch granules disperse and swell evenly, giving a smooth, thickened soup instead of a grainy or floury one.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, mushroom, ketchup, flour, parsley. 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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