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Beef Boulli

A boiled beef dish with carrots, turnips, 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 the beef

  1. Cook the beef until done, then carefully 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 and vegetables

  1. Make a sauce by mixing ½ pint of the soup, 1 tablespoon 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 some of the skimmed fat with 1-2 tablespoons of flour and stir into the soup over heat.

Serve

  1. Garnish the beef with parsley.

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 body of the dish as the meat that is cooked and served.
Carrots
Add sweetness and soft texture as they heat through in the soup.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture as they heat through in the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup when mixed with skimmed fat and stirred in over heat.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savory depth and umami to the sauce.

The step that matters

Skim off the fat from the cooled soup. Fat left on the surface makes the broth greasy, and skimming it when cool lets the fat solidify so it lifts off cleanly. The skimmed fat is also reused for thickening.

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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