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Bouillie Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with turnips, carrots, and celery served in separate dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bouillie Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Place the brisket of beef in a kettle and cover it with water.

  2. Boil rapidly for 2 hours.

  3. Reduce heat and stew for 6 hours, adding water as needed.

  4. Add turnips, carrots, and celery to the kettle.

Make the soup and serve

  1. One hour before the meat is done, remove some broth to fill a soup dish.

  2. In the broth, boil turnips and carrots cut into small pieces with celery for 1 hour.

  3. Season the soup with salt and pepper.

  4. Serve the beef on one dish and the soup in another.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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 brisket
Long stewing breaks down tough connective tissue, making the meat tender and rich.
Turnips
Hold their shape during long simmering and add a mildly sweet, earthy flavor to the broth.
Carrots
Soften during simmering and add natural sweetness to the broth.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory flavor to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Keeping the stew at a gentle stew after the initial boil. Rapid boiling for two hours is followed by a long, gentle stew of six hours. Keeping the liquid at a low simmer lets collagen in the brisket convert to gelatin slowly, so the meat becomes tender without toughening or drying out.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Turnipthe original
  4. Tomatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, pepper. 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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