Skip to main content
Main

Clear Beef Tea

A clear beef broth made by simmering beef, herbs, and vegetables, clarified with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Clear Beef Tea

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the beef, bay leaf, parsley, celery, and onion in a soup pot.

  2. Cover with cold water and simmer gently for just over an hour.

  3. Bring to a boil, skim, then reduce heat and simmer for another two hours.

  4. Strain out the vegetables and season the broth.

Clarify and serve

  1. Mix the egg white and shell with cold water, then add the mixture to the broth.

  2. Boil for 10-12 minutes.

  3. Add a little cold water and boil again.

  4. Strain through a cloth.

  5. Serve.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Beef + celerytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Finely chopped beef
Releases flavor and gelatin into the water, giving the broth its body and savory taste.
Egg white and shell
As it cooks, it gathers suspended particles so they can be strained out, leaving the broth clear.

The step that matters

Simmering the egg white mixture. The egg white must be added to the broth before it heats fully and then boiled briefly so it coagulates and traps fine particles; boiling too hard can break up the raft and cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, celery, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, celery, 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes