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Peptonised Meat

Meat tenderized by soaking in beef tea, water, pancreatic extract, and bicarbonate of soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Peptonised Meat

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 140°F (60°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and digest

  1. Combine the beef tea and water in a container.

  2. Add the Extractum Pancreatis and bicarbonate of soda.

  3. Keep the mixture in a warm place, not exceeding 140°F (60°C), for three hours.

Finish

  1. After three hours, boil the mixture to kill any remaining activity in the Pancreatic Extract.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole beef tea
Supplies the meat protein that the pancreatic enzymes break down into softer, more digestible peptones.
Extractum pancreatis
Pancreatic enzymes that break the meat proteins into smaller peptides, which makes the mixture easy to digest.
Bicarbonate of soda
Makes the mixture mildly alkaline, which helps the pancreatic enzymes work effectively.

The step that matters

Holding the warm temperature. Pancreatic enzymes work best in gentle warmth and lose activity when hot, so the mixture must stay at or below 140°F (60°C) for the full three hours. Boiling at the end stops the enzymes so digestion does not continue.

“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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