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Drink

Beef Tea

A tea made by boiling beef in water, seasoned with salt, and finished with raw chopped meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,533 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef into small bits.

  2. Soak the beef in water for 45 minutes.

Make the tea

  1. Place the beef and water in a quart champagne bottle.

  2. Add a pinch of salt and cork tightly, securing the cork with wire.

  3. Boil the bottle in a saucepan of warm water for 1.5 hours.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture through a napkin.

  2. Before serving, add 1 teaspoon of finely chopped raw meat to a goblet of the tea and let it stand for 5 minutes.

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. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Supplies the meaty flavour and body that dissolve into the liquid during long, gentle heating.
Water
Carries the dissolved meat flavour and draws it out of the beef as it heats.

The step that matters

Boil the bottle in a saucepan of warm water for 1.5 hours. Keeping the heat gentle and steady for the full time draws out flavour slowly. A tightly sealed cork keeps the liquid from escaping and concentrating unevenly during the long heating.

“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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