Skip to main content
Main

Beef Bouilli and Soup

A boiled beef dish with vegetables, thickened gravy, and optional port wine and mushroom catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Bouilli and Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Break the bones of the leg and shin or use brisket, place in a large pot and cover with water.

  2. Bring to a boil over high heat, skimming off any foam that rises.

  3. Add 2 carrots, 2 onions, 2 turnips, 2 heads of celery, parsley, spices, and ham or anchovy.

  4. Simmer gently for 4-5 hours, then remove the meat and keep warm.

Make the gravy and vegetables

  1. Add a large carrot, onion, turnip, and head of celery to the soup and boil until tender.

  2. Remove the vegetables, slice them, and thicken part of the gravy with flour.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables to the gravy and warm through.

  4. Serve the sauce over the whole meat or around sliced meat.

Make the soup

  1. For soup, strain the broth into a clean pot, add the cooked vegetables, and remove excess fat.

  2. Flavor the soup with port wine, pepper, and mushroom catsup, thickening with flour or arrowroot if needed.

  3. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes and add browned sugar for color if desired.

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. Parsley + peppertop 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

Beef leg, shin or brisket
Gives the broth its rich meaty flavor and tender, gelatinous body during long simmering.
Flour
Thickens the gravy and soup so the sauce coats the meat and vegetables.
Carrots, onions, turnips and celery
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth, then become tender vegetables served with the meat.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and a fruity aroma to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 4-5 hours. A gentle simmer lets collagen in the tough beef break down into gelatin for a tender meat and a full-bodied broth. A hard boil toughens the meat and clouds the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, allspice, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, allspice, 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.

More beef bouilli recipes

Soup 10 See all 19 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes