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French Receipt for Hashed Bouilli

A French boiled beef dish with a butter‑flour sauce, onions, parsley, and egg yolk thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

French Receipt for Hashed Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute.

  3. Add the chopped onion and minced parsley, cooking until browned.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  5. Pour in the boiling water or bouillon.

Finish and serve

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

  2. Mix the egg yolks with lemon juice and stir into the sauce to thicken.

  3. For variation, omit the eggs and add catsup and pickled 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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a smooth base.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce when gently heated, giving it body and richness.
Beef
Forms the main body of the dish, gently warmed in the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the sauce. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Temper them with a little hot sauce first and keep the heat low, so the sauce turns smooth and creamy rather than grainy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, beef, 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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