Skip to main content
Preserve

Pot-au-feu or Soup

A French beef stew made with ox cheek, vegetables, and herbs simmered for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Leek and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot-au-feu or Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pot

  1. Add 6 quarts of water to a large pot.

  2. Tie 4 lbs of beef or ox cheek into a shape with string.

  3. Place the tied beef in the pot.

  4. Bring the water to a boil.

  5. Add ½ oz of coarse sea salt.

  6. Reduce heat to simmer.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash 2 carrots, 2 leeks, 2 turnips, 1 parsnip, and 1 small head of celery in cold water.

  2. Scrape the carrots and parsnip and cut them into quarters.

  3. Trim the green leaves from the leeks, using only the white part.

  4. Remove the green tops from the celery.

  5. Tie the leeks, celery, parsnip, and carrots together with string.

  6. Cut the cabbage in half, wash it thoroughly, and tie it together with string.

Simmer

  1. Skim the pot occasionally.

  2. Simmer the pot-au-feu gently for 1 hour.

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. Leek + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides rich flavor and tender meat as its connective tissue slowly breaks down during simmering.
Leeks
Add a mild, sweet onion-like flavor that mellows and perfumes the broth.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and color to the broth as they cook.
Cabbage
Adds subtle sweetness and body to the broth while becoming tender.

The step that matters

Keep the simmer gentle. Boiling vigorously toughens meat proteins and makes the broth cloudy, while a gentle simmer lets connective tissue break down slowly and keeps the broth clear.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, leek, turnip, parsnip, celery, thyme):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, leek, turnip, parsnip, celery, thyme. 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 pot-au-feu recipes

Russian 5French 4 See all 133 →

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes