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Hot Breakfast Dishes

Beef fillets or cutlets wrapped in buttered paper, baked or grilled briefly, served with watercress or potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hot Breakfast Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wrap leftover fillets or cutlets in heart-shaped pieces of buttered or oiled paper.

  2. Add a pat of savory or plain butter on each side.

  3. Add d'Uxelle mixture or finely minced chives and parsley.

Heat and serve

  1. Place on a baking tin in the oven or on a grill for 1-2 minutes until hot, but do not cook.

  2. Serve with seasoned watercress or fried or mashed potatoes.

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. Chive + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + potatotop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together611 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Watercress + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Beef + chivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together304 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Leftover fillets of beef or cutlets
Provides the cooked meat that is gently reheated inside the paper.
Butter or oil
Coats the paper so the meat does not stick and adds moisture as it heats.
Savory or plain butter
Melts over the meat, adding richness and moisture to the packet.
D'uxelle mixture or finely minced chives and parsley
Adds aroma and savory flavour from the herbs and mushrooms.

The step that matters

Heating without cooking. The packet only needs to get hot for 1-2 minutes, because the meat is already cooked. Longer heat would toughen the beef and dry out the butter, so the paper should be checked closely.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, chive, watercress):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, chive, watercress. 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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