Name: Chicken, Veal, or Mutton Tea
Ingredients: 1 chicken, veal, or mutton; water; pearl barley, rice, vermicelli, or semolina (optional)

Why it works: Chicken and barley work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 265 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Chicken, Veal, or Mutton Tea

Ingredients

1 chicken, veal, or mutton
water
pearl barley, rice, vermicelli, or semolina (optional)

Directions

Boil the meat in a saucepan with enough water for two hours.
Strain the broth.
Optionally, add pearl barley, rice, vermicelli, or semolina to increase nourishment.
For veal broth, use the fleshy part of the knuckle.
For chicken broth, include both bones and chopped flesh, and add feet for flavor.

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.

Chicken + barleytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together265 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat (in the method): Provides the flavor and gelatin that give the broth its body and taste.
Pearl barley, rice, vermicelli, or semolina: Optional starch that adds body and thickens the broth slightly as it cooks.

“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.