Name: Beef Juice
Ingredients: 1 inch thick piece of round or flank steak; salt; lemon; hot water (optional); bread (optional)

Why it works: Lemon and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Beef Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

Broil the steak for 8 minutes.
Place the steak on a warm plate and cut it into small pieces.
Press the pieces in a lemon squeezer to extract the juice.
Season the juice with a little salt.

Serve

Serve the juice to the patient.
Soak bread in the juice.
Add hot water to the juice to make beef tea.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,445 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Round or flank steak: Provides the meat whose juices are extracted, giving the drink its beefy flavour and nutrients.
Salt: Seasons the juice, bringing out its savoury flavour.

“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.