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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.

  4. Garnish the beef with parsley.

Make the sauce

  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.

  3. Add the diced carrots and turnips to the pot.

  4. Heat the mixture until hot.

  5. Mix 2 tablespoons of flour with some of the skimmed fat.

  6. Stir the flour mixture into the soup over heat.

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

Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth sauce when mixed with fat and stirred in over heat.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury depth and umami flavour to the sauce.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the rich beef and sauce.
Carrots
Contribute sweetness and firm texture to the finished sauce.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and tender body to the vegetables in the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the hot soup. Flour thickens only when its starch is dispersed evenly. Mixing it with fat first and stirring it into hot liquid helps prevent lumps, so the sauce turns smooth rather than clumped.

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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