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Soup

Beef-Tea with Vegetable Juice

A soup made from dried haricot beans, warm water, and vegetable juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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

Prepare and simmer

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

  2. Simmer briskly for 1 to 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the water and let it cool.

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

  3. Strain the mixture before serving.

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

Dried haricot beans
Simmered in water, they release starch and savoury flavour that give the liquid body.
Vegetables
Their cooking liquid adds aroma and savoury flavour to the finished tea.

The step that matters

Simmer briskly for 1 to 2 hours. A long, steady simmer is what draws flavour and body out of the beans into the water. Stopping early leaves a thin, weak liquid.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Black-eyed peafits less well

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