Why it works: Beef and leek work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 659 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Directions
Make the stock
Place the beef in an iron pot with water and simmer for 4 hours, skimming frequently.
Remove the beef and strain the stock.
Wash and trim the leeks, cutting the white part into 1‑inch lengths and soaking in cold water.
Boil the green part of the leeks in the beef stock until pulpy, then strain through a fine sieve.
Cook the soup
Truss the fowl and place it in a stewpan with the white leeks and stock.
Add salt and pepper, bring to a boil, then simmer gently for 1 hour.
Serve
Serve in a tureen or with the fowl separately, reserving a cup of soup to pour over it.
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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Beef + leektop 6% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together659 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).
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Leek + white peppertop 17% of all pairsAroma overlaplowMentioned together57 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
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Beef + white peppertop 17% of all pairsAroma overlaplowMentioned together616 recipes
Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Lean beef
- Slowly simmered to build a rich, flavourful stock as the base of the soup.
- Leeks
- Their green part breaks down into a pulp that thickens and flavours the broth.
- Fowl
- Cooks gently in the stock, releasing savoury flavour and body into the soup.
The step that matters
Simmer the stock gently and skim it. Hard boiling makes the stock cloudy and greasy, while regular skimming removes impurities and fat so the broth stays clear and clean-tasting.
Flavor stand-ins for the white pepper
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, leek):
- Celerybetter flavor fit
- Thymebetter flavor fit
- Garlicbetter flavor fit
- White pepperthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against beef, leek. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).
“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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