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Fillet of Beef

A slow-cooked beef fillet flavored with bacon fat, mace, pepper, salt, herbs, mustard, onion, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fillet of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Carefully cut out the fillet from the sirloin, leaving a small portion of fat on the sides.

  2. Lard the fillet lengthwise with small pieces of fat bacon.

  3. Rub the fillet with pounded mace, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

Cook

  1. Place the fillet in a stewpan and cover the top with coarse paste.

  2. Cook over hot ashes for three to four hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare beef stock using white wine instead of water, simmering slowly with the pot covered to retain steam.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Sirloin of beef
Provides the lean fillet meat that forms the main body of the dish.
Fat bacon
Larding adds fat that melts during the long cook, keeping the lean fillet moist and tender.
White wine
Replaces water in the stock, adding acidity and aroma to the liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the surface of the meat and helps draw out flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking over hot ashes for three to four hours. Long, gentle heat is needed to cook the fillet through without drying it. Too much heat dries the surface before the centre is done, so the fillet needs steady, moderate heat.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, white wine, onion, mustard):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, white wine, onion, mustard. 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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