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Cold Beef Bouillie, a LA Mattre d’Hotel

A cold beef dish with sliced beef, onion or shallots, pepper, coarse sea salt, mustard, egg, oil, vinegar, garnished with watercress or horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 293 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Beef Bouillie, a LA Mattre d’Hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cold beef into pieces about ½ inch thick and 3 fingers wide.

  2. In a bowl, mix together the chopped onion or shallots, pepper, coarse sea salt, mustard, egg, oil, and vinegar.

  3. Pour the mixture over the sliced beef.

Serve

  1. Garnish with watercress or scraped horseradish 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. Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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

Egg
Emulsifies the oil and vinegar so the dressing clings smoothly to the beef.
Oil
Adds richness and moisture, carrying flavour across the sliced beef.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and cuts the richness of the oil.
Mustard
Adds pungency and helps hold the emulsion together.
Chopped onion or shallots
Adds sharp aromatic flavour to the dressing.

The step that matters

Mixing the dressing. The egg, oil and vinegar must be whisked well so they form a stable emulsion; if they separate, the sauce turns greasy and fails to coat the beef evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, mustard, egg, vinegar, watercress):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, mustard, egg, vinegar, watercress. 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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