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Drink

Beef Tea

A broth made from lean beef, pearl barley, and spices, served as a tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and barley work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 458 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beef, barley, and cold water.

  2. Bring to a boil and then simmer slowly until the meat is fully cooked and flavors are extracted.

  3. Add ground mace, salt, and pepper to taste.

  4. To enhance the color, burn the sugar in an iron spoon over hot coals and add it to the mixture.

  5. Strain the tea and let it cool.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, remove any fat from the surface.

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 + barleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together458 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Barley + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together897 recipes

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

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Releases flavor and body into the water as it simmers.
Pearl barley
Adds body and a mild thickness to the broth as it cooks.
Sugar
Burned to a dark caramel, it deepens the color of the tea.

The step that matters

Burning the sugar for color. Sugar burns quickly from caramel to bitter black. Stop when it is deep brown and still smells sweet, since over-burned sugar adds bitterness rather than color.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, barley, pepper, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, barley, pepper, sugar. 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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