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Delicious Beef-tea

A clear beef broth made by steeping beef in cold water with salt, parsley, and celery leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Delicious Beef-tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the prepared beef in a clean bottle.

  2. Add salt, parsley, and celery leaves.

  3. Pour in the cold water.

  4. Cork the bottle tightly and place it in a pot of lukewarm water.

Cook

  1. Gradually bring the water to a boil.

  2. Boil for 3 to 4 hours; it can be used after 2 hours but is better if cooked longer.

Serve

  1. Uncork the bottle, strain the liquid, and serve with 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.

  1. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Beef + celerytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Supplies the meat flavour and dissolved savoury compounds that give the tea its body.
Cold water
Extracts flavour from the beef slowly as it heats, forming the liquid base.

The step that matters

Bringing the water to a boil gradually. Heating the bottle gently in lukewarm water before boiling lets the temperature rise slowly, so the beef releases its juices into the liquid instead of toughening. Rapid heating tends to make meat proteins seize and squeeze out moisture.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Tarragonfits about as well
  2. Pepperfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Rosemaryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery. 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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