Name: Strong Beef Tea
Ingredients: 1 pound lean beef; coarse sea salt; toasted bread

Why it works: Beef and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,032 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Strong Beef Tea

Ingredients

1 pound lean beef
coarse sea salt
toasted bread

Directions

Prepare

Cut the beef into small squares.
Place the beef in a wide-necked bottle and add a little coarse sea salt.
Cover the mouth of the bottle with muslin.

Stew and serve

Stew the bottle by the fire for six hours.
Remove the juice from the bottle.
Serve the juice with toasted bread.

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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,032 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 become the tea, carrying most of the flavour.
Toasted bread: Adds a crisp, browned contrast to the savoury juice when served alongside it.

“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.