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French Receipt for Hashed Bouilu

A hash of sliced beef cooked in a thickened sauce of onion, parsley, broth, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

French Receipt for Hashed Bouilu

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a slow fire, shake the batter and flour together for a minute.

  2. Stir in the chopped onion and minced parsley until browned.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, then add boiling water or broth.

Finish the hash

  1. Add the beef slices and heat gradually until near boiling.

  2. Thicken the sauce with the egg yolks mixed with lemon juice.

  3. For variation, omit the eggs and add catsup and minced gherkins.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and enrich it with richness and body as they set gently with heat.
Flour
Thickens the liquid with starch so the sauce becomes body rather than watery.
Beef
Provides the main substance of the hash, cooked gently in the sauce until tender.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and browning flavour to the base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the egg yolks. Egg yolks set when heated, so if the sauce is too hot or boils after adding them, they can curdle and turn grainy. Add them off the heat or with gentle warming, stirring constantly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, beef, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, beef, lemon. 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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