Name: Beef Tea of Mixed Meat
Ingredients: 1 pound beef, cut into small pieces; 1 pound mutton, cut into small pieces; 1 pound veal, cut into small pieces; 3 pints water; dry toast, for serving

Why it works: Beef and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef Tea of Mixed Meat

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

1 pound beef, cut into small pieces
1 pound mutton, cut into small pieces
1 pound veal, cut into small pieces
3 pints water
dry toast, for serving

Directions

Make the beef tea

Combine beef, mutton, and veal in a saucepan.
Add 3 pints of water and bring to a boil.
Skim the surface thoroughly and reduce heat to simmer for 4 hours.
Strain the mixture to extract the liquid.

Serve

Serve the beef tea with dry toast.

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.

Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,373 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,784 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Mutton + vealtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,394 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef: Provides the main meaty flavour and body of the broth as it simmers.
Mutton: Adds richer, more savoury meat flavour to the broth.
Veal: Contributes gelatine and a mild meaty flavour to the liquid.

The step that matters

Skim the surface thoroughly. Foam and fat rising during the initial boil can cloud the liquid and give it a greasy, impure taste. Removing them early keeps the tea clear and clean-flavoured as it simmers for hours.

“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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Beef Tea of Mixed Meat