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Fillets of Beef a LA Neapolitaine

A dish of beef fillets coated in breadcrumbs, fried, served with mashed potatoes, mushrooms, and a brown sauce with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and horseradish work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 171 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fillets of Beef a LA Neapolitaine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillets

  1. Cut the steak into round fillets.

  2. Dip each fillet in egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the fillets in 2 oz of butter until golden.

Make the mushrooms and sauce

  1. Peel and chop the mushrooms, then fry them in 1 oz of butter for a few minutes.

  2. In a saucepan, simmer the brown sauce with currant jelly, sweet herbs, and peppercorns for 20 minutes, then strain and pour around the dish.

Assemble and serve

  1. Make a border of mashed potatoes on a serving plate.

  2. Arrange the fillets around the potato border.

  3. Fill the center with the fried mushrooms.

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. Potato + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Potato + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together968 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Forms the main protein, cut into fillets that cook through and brown on the outside.
Egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs adhere to the fillets.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried in butter.
Mushrooms
Release moisture as they cook and add savory, earthy flavour to the centre filling.
Potatoes
Mashed into a border that gives structure and a soft, creamy contrast to the fillets.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body to the brown sauce, balancing its savoury richness.

The step that matters

Frying the coated fillets in butter. Butter browns through the Maillard reaction and the crumb coating crisps only if the heat is high enough to brown the surface before it soaks up fat or steams. Too low a heat gives pale, greasy coating, while the interior still needs to be cooked through.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, potato, ham, egg, mushroom, sauce):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, potato, ham, egg, mushroom, sauce. 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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