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Clarified Beef Tea

A clarified beef tea made with egg white, cold water, beef tea, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Beef and tea work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 417 recipes. Both carry 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan, which smells thiamin, meat. The science ↓

Clarified Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg white with the cold water until well combined.

  2. Add the beef tea and bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Season with salt to taste.

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. Beef + teatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  2. Egg + beeftop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  3. Egg + teatop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together821 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Helps clarify the beef tea by binding fine particles as it heats, leaving a clearer broth.

The step that matters

Bringing the mixture to a boil. Once the egg white is added, the mixture should be heated gently and allowed to rise, then settle. Boiling too vigorously can break up the egg white raft, so it may not trap impurities and the tea will stay cloudy.

“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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