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Bouillon or Pot-au-feu

A beef broth with vegetables, simmered for hours, served with lettuce, celery, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bouillon or Pot-au-feu

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Lightly fry the beef slices in a little butter.

Make the broth

  1. Add 1 ½ cups of water and boil quickly to a glaze.

  2. Add the remaining water and simmer for 4 hours.

  3. Half an hour before serving, add the sliced lettuce and celery.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread, cut it into strips, pour the soup over it, and serve with the meat.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main protein; slow simmering in liquid keeps the slices tender and flavours the broth.
Celery
Adds a crisp, aromatic note to the broth when added late so it stays slightly firm.
Lettuce
Adds a light, fresh vegetable flavour and softens briefly in the hot broth.

The step that matters

Add the remaining water and simmer for 4 hours. A long, gentle simmer below a rolling boil lets the beef become tender and release flavour into the broth. Boiling hard toughens the meat and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, sugar, butter, lettuce, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, sugar, butter, lettuce, celery. 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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