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Fillets of Beef with Tomatoes

Fillets of beef served with tomato slices, butter sauce, and a lemon‑parsley seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fillets of Beef with Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the fillet into 5 or 6 slices, removing skin and fat.

  2. Fry the fillets in 2 oz of butter in a saucepan until not fully cooked.

  3. Keep the fillets hot on a plate.

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Skin and slice the tomatoes, then cook them in the remaining butter.

Assemble and serve

  1. Glaze the fillets with liquefied Bovril and place on a hot dish.

  2. Top each fillet with a round of tomato.

  3. Mix lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt, and pepper with the remaining 1 oz of butter and spread on the tomatoes.

  4. Serve with heated brown sauce from the pan used for the fillets.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Fillet of beef
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked quickly to stay tender.
Butter
Fat for frying that adds richness and browning to the beef and tomatoes.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and gentle acidity that balances the rich beef and butter.

The step that matters

Frying the fillets until not fully cooked. Beef fillet is tender and best served rare to medium-rare. Overcooking in the pan toughens the meat and dries the juices, and the fillets keep cooking slightly while they rest on the hot plate.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, parsley, lemon, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, parsley, lemon, pepper. 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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