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To Stew a Piece of Beef, or Make Beef Bouilli

A stew of beef with butter, onions, carrots, turnip, and a ketchup-flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Stew a Piece of Beef, or Make Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the beef

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the beef and brown it on all sides.

  3. Remove the beef and place two or three skewers in the bottom of the pan.

  4. Return the beef to the pan and add the hot water and sliced onions.

Stew and thicken

  1. Cover the pan and stew slowly for about 2 hours until the beef is tender.

  2. Remove the beef and thicken the gravy with flour mixed with ketchup, pepper, and salt.

  3. Add the boiled carrot and turnip to the gravy and boil for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the beef with the gravy in a hash dish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered stewing.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it heats, giving it body.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they stew, adding flavour to the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the beef and a rich flavour to the pan.

The step that matters

Stew slowly with the lid on. Low, covered heat lets the tough connective tissue in brisket or rump break down gradually. Boiling hard instead toughens the meat's outer fibres and can leave it dry and chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, pepper, flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, pepper, flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip. 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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