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Soup

Beef Tea

A thick beef and mutton broth made by simmering minced meat and bones for four hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and beef 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 Tea

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove all fat, sinew, and skin from the beef and mutton.

  2. Mince the beef and mutton finely.

  3. Remove the flesh from the chicken.

  4. Mince the chicken finely.

  5. Crush the leg and wing bones.

  6. Remove the marrow from the crushed bones.

Stew and strain

  1. Place all the minced meat and bones into an earthenware pot.

  2. Cover the pot with a paper cap.

  3. Place the covered pot in a saucepan with enough water to come halfway up the pot.

  4. Stew for four hours.

  5. Add boiling water as needed to maintain the water level.

  6. Strain the mixture through muslin with a sheet of white blotting paper.

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. Chicken + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + muttontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together471 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat flavour and body to the broth as it stews.
Mutton
Adds rich, savoury meat flavour and body to the broth.
Chicken
Contributes mild meat flavour and gelatin-rich body to the tea.

The step that matters

Keeping the water level topped up. The pot stews in a water bath, so if the outer water runs low the contents can overheat unevenly or scorch. Adding boiling water rather than cold keeps the temperature steady and the stew gently simmering.

“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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