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Beef Bouilli

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, carrots, turnips, spices, egg, and bread crumbs.

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 ↓

Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Simmer the beef

  1. Place the beef in a pot and cover with water.

  2. Add ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt and bring to a boil.

  3. Once boiling, reduce heat and let it simmer slowly.

  4. Peel and chop the onions, and dice the carrots and turnips.

  5. Add the chopped vegetables to the pot with the beef.

  6. Tie the black peppercorns, red pepper pod, and celery seed in a muslin bag and add it to the pot.

  7. Sprinkle the summer savory over the ingredients and simmer for 3 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, beat the egg and spread it on top of the beef.

  2. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and brown in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Summer savory + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + summer savorytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Round beef
Provides the main substance of the dish, becoming tender through long slow simmering.
Egg
Binds the topping and helps it set and brown when baked.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the beef's surface in the oven.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color to the broth as they cook.
Onions
Add savory flavor to the broth during simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly after boiling. A rolling boil toughens meat proteins and makes the beef stringy, so the heat must be reduced to a gentle simmer for a long, tender cook.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, pepper, celery, summer savory, turnip, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, pepper, celery, summer savory, turnip, egg. 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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