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Dessert

Beef-tea Custard

A custard made with beef tea, eggs, and salt, cooked by steaming.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and tea work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 417 recipes. Both carry 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan, which smells thiamin, meat. The science ↓

Beef-tea Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the yolks of 2 eggs and the white of 1 egg in a small bowl.

  2. Pour in ½ cup of cold beef tea and whisk until well mixed.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered cup or small dish.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the cup with a piece of paper and place it in a saucepan with boiling water, ensuring the water does not cover the cup.

  2. Simmer for 15 minutes without boiling.

  3. Remove the cup from the saucepan, take off the paper, and serve.

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. Beef + teatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  2. Beef + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Tea + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together821 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard into a soft, tender structure as they cook gently.
Beef tea
Provides the liquid base and savory flavor that the eggs set within.

The step that matters

Simmer without boiling. Egg proteins set into a smooth custard at moderate heat, while boiling water or a hard simmer can overheat the mixture, causing it to curdle, bubble, and turn grainy or spongy.

“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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