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Beef-Tea with Vegetable Juice

A savory beverage made by simmering dried haricot beans with water, then adding vegetable juice and a sugar coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef-Tea with Vegetable Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the beef tea

  1. Wash the beans and place them in a pot with warm water.

  2. Simmer briskly for 1 to 2 hours.

  3. Remove the water and let it cool.

Add vegetable juice and color

  1. Boil chopped vegetables in a little water and add the juice to the beef-tea.

  2. Burn a little sugar in an iron spoon and add it to the infusion.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Simmering in water releases starch and flavor, giving the liquid body and a savory taste.
Vegetables
Boiling them in water releases their juice, adding aroma and mild vegetable flavor.
Sugar
Burning it caramelizes the sugar, darkening the liquid to a brown color and adding a slightly bitter caramel note.

The step that matters

Burn a little sugar in an iron spoon. Sugar caramelizes as it heats, then turns bitter and dark if it burns too far. Stopping at a deep amber keeps the color rich without a harsh, acrid taste.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, parsley, carrot, 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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