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Fillets Op Beef with Anchovy

Fillets of beef cooked with anchovies, bacon, broth, wine, garlic, cloves, herbs, butter, flour, cream, capers, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fillets Op Beef with Anchovy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the anchovies in water for about two hours.

  2. Split the anchovies and mix them with the beef fillet and bacon.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the mixture on low heat with broth, white wine, garlic, cloves, and herbs.

  2. Once cooked, strain the sauce.

  3. Add butter rolled in flour, cream, capers, and mix in the egg yolk.

  4. Pour the sauce over the fillet.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. White wine + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,044 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the cooking liquid, adding a deep savoury, salty backbone to the sauce.
Beef fillet
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the broth and wine.
Butter and flour
Roux-style base that thickens the strained sauce and gives it a smooth, rounded body.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, silkier texture to the finished sauce.
Egg yolk
Emulsifies and enriches the sauce, helping it thicken and turn glossy.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently; if the sauce is too hot when it is added, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, white wine, garlic, butter, flour, cream, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, white wine, garlic, butter, flour, cream, egg. 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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