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Beef Bouillie

A slow‑cooked beef broth with optional vegetables and herbs, served with the beef and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Bouillie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Tie the beef securely with kitchen twine and place it in a large pot.

  2. Cover the beef with water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add a moderate amount of coarse sea salt when the water starts boiling.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer slowly for about 3 hours, adding boiling water as needed.

  5. Add vegetables and herbs in the last hour of cooking.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper before serving.

  2. Serve the beef in the soup with vegetables or separately, garnished 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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh beef
Provides the meat and collagen that give the broth body and tender, flavorful meat after slow simmering.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aroma to the broth as they cook.
Onions
Add savory depth and aroma to the broth as they soften.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory flavor to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets the connective tissue in the beef break down gradually, yielding tender meat and a clear broth. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the soup.

“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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