Name: Beef, Veal, and Chicken Tea
Ingredients: slices of beef; slices of veal; slices of chicken; 1 pint boiling water; a pinch of salt

Why it works: Beef and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,148 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Beef, Veal, and Chicken Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Place the slices of beef, veal, or chicken in a covered dish.
Set the dish over a steam kettle.
Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the meat.
Let it stand for one hour.
Pour off the liquid and season with a pinch of salt.

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 + chickentop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,148 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,784 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,243 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef: Gives the tea its meaty flavour as it steeps in the hot water.
Veal: Adds a mild, delicate meat flavour to the liquid as it steeps.
Chicken: Adds a light meat flavour and savoury body to the liquid as it steeps.

“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.