Name: Beef Tea
Ingredients: 2 pounds fresh beef, trimmed of fat; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ½ clove; 4 peppercorns; 1½ pints cold water

Why it works: Beef and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,462 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

Cut the beef into small pieces, about the size of a fingertip, and score it to release the juices.
Place the beef in a jar with salt, clove, peppercorns, and cold water.

Cook and strain

Tie the jar securely and immerse it in a saucepan of water.
Bring the water to a gentle boil and cook for 2½ hours.
Strain the mixture and remove any fat from the surface using silver paper or stale bread.

Serve

Optionally, add boiled rice or tapioca before serving.

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 + clovetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,462 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh beef: Provides the meat flavour and the juices that dissolve into the broth.
Cold water: Extracts flavour slowly from the beef as it heats, giving a clear liquid.

The step that matters

Bring the water to a gentle boil and cook for 2½ hours. Keeping the outer saucepan at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets the beef release its juices slowly. A hard boil makes the liquid cloudy and greasy, so it is better to keep the heat low and steady.

“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.