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Beef Boulli

A boiled leg of beef served with diced carrots and turnips, garnished with parsley and a mushroom ketchup–mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Cook and strain

  1. Cook the leg of beef until done.

  2. Transfer the cooked beef to an earthen pan, leaving the vegetables and seasoning behind.

  3. Strain the soup through a sieve over the beef.

  4. Let the strained soup cool.

  5. Skim off the fat from the cooled soup.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix ¼ pint of the soup, 1 tablespoon mushroom ketchup, and 1 teaspoon mustard to make a sauce.

  2. Serve the beef garnished with parsley and the sauce.

Finish the soup

  1. Strain the soup again into a clean saucepan.

  2. Add diced carrots and turnips to the hot soup.

  3. Serve the soup with vegetables.

  4. Mix some of the skimmed fat with 1 or 2 tablespoons flour.

  5. Stir the mixture into the soup over heat.

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
Forms the main protein of the dish, cooked until done and served in its own pan.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and a soft, tender texture to the soup.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft body to the soup as they cook.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharpness that cuts through the richness of the beef and fat.
Flour
Thickens the soup when its starch cooks in hot liquid, giving body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the fat and flour into the hot soup. Flour clumps if added dry or unevenly. Mixing it with fat first coats the starch granules so they disperse, and the heat then swells the starch to thicken the soup smoothly.

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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