Name: Beef Tea
Ingredients: 1 pound lean beef; coarse sea salt (optional); 1 thick steak; 1 lemon

Why it works: Beef and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,278 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

1 pound lean beef
coarse sea salt (optional)
1 thick steak
1 lemon

Directions

Make the beef tea

Cut the lean beef into small pieces and place it in a tightly corked bottle.
Submerge the bottle in a kettle of warm water and bring the water to a boil for a considerable time.
Remove the bottle and pour out the contents.
Add a little coarse sea salt if desired and serve 1 teaspoon at a time.

Alternative method

For an alternative method, broil the thick steak slightly until the juices start to flow.
Squeeze the steak thoroughly using a lemon squeezer to extract the juice.

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 + lemontop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,278 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef: Provides the meat juices that make up the liquid tea.
Thick steak: Supplies juice when broiled lightly and then squeezed in the alternative method.

“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.