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To Make Beef Tea Quickly

A simple beef broth made by simmering lean beef strips in cold water for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Beef Tea Quickly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef into strips and remove all fat and sinew.

  2. Place the beef in an earthen jar and add the cold water.

  3. Cover the jar with a bladder or brown paper.

Cook

  1. Set the jar in a cool oven or a saucepan of cold water.

  2. Slowly bring to a boil and cook for 4 to 5 hours.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain through a coarse strainer and skim off the fat.

  2. Add optional flavorings 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.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 flavor and the dissolved protein and savory compounds that make up the tea.
Cold water
Slowly extracts flavor and soluble compounds from the beef as it heats.

The step that matters

Slowly bring to a boil. Starting in cold water and heating gently lets the beef release its flavor gradually. Rapid boiling would toughen the meat and leave the liquid cloudy and greasy.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, clove, parsley, tomato):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, parsley, tomato. 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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