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Drink

Beef Tea

A simple beef tea made by simmering diced beef with butter, salt, water, and optional peppercorns and shallot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,426 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juices

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Add the diced beef and sprinkle with salt.

  3. Cover the stewpan tightly.

  4. Cook for 20 minutes, draining the gravy every 5 minutes.

  5. Once the juices are extracted, set them aside.

Make the tea

  1. Add 1 pint of water to the meat and let it boil gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour off the tea without straining, keeping the thick portion.

  3. If needed, strain the tea through a linen or flannel bag.

  4. Combine the extracted juices with the tea and serve hot.

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. Butter + shallottop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beefsteak
Provides the meat whose juices and flavor make up the tea.
Fresh butter
Melts to coat the beef and help draw out its juices gently.
Water
Extracts remaining flavor from the meat during the gentle boil.

The step that matters

Cook the beef covered over low heat. Gentle heat with the lid on lets the meat release its juices slowly without toughening or browning. Boiling too hard makes the meat firm and the tea cloudier.

“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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