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Beef-tea

A hot beverage made by adding sago or tapioca to beef tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Beef-tea

Why it works: Celery and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,668 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Beef-tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sago

  1. Soak the sago or tapioca in cold water for 1 hour to remove the earthy taste.

  2. Strain the sago or tapioca.

Make the beef tea

  1. Place the strained sago or tapioca in a saucepan with ½ cup of fresh water.

  2. Boil gently until tender.

  3. Add 1 pint of hot beef tea.

  4. Simmer with the sago for 1-2 minutes.

  5. Add celery, onion, or cloves for added flavor.

  6. Stir in cream if desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Tea + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together181 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Sago or tapioca
Starch that thickens the liquid and gives the tea a soft, slightly gelled body as it cooks.
Beef tea
Main liquid that carries the savory beef flavour through the whole dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel to the finished tea.

The step that matters

Boil gently until tender. Starch grains swell and burst slowly in gentle heat. Boiling hard can break them unevenly and make the texture gluey or cloudy, while undercooked grains stay chalky at the centre.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, tea, cream, onion, clove):

  1. Gingerfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, tea, cream, onion, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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