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Soup

Beef-tea with White of Egg

A beef broth flavored with egg white, simmered with lean beef and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 with White of Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove skin and sinew from the beef and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Place the beef in a jar with a little coarse sea salt and 1½ pints of cold water.

Make the broth

  1. Cover the jar and simmer in a saucepan of cold water for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture through a coarse strainer.

  3. Pound the residue in a mortar, then pass it through a wire sieve and add it to the beef tea.

Clarify with egg white

  1. Beat the egg white in a bowl until frothy.

  2. Slowly add the hot beef tea while stirring continuously.

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

Beef
Provides the main flavour and body of the broth as it slowly releases its juices into the water.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate as the broth heats, trapping fine particles so the broth clears.
Beef tea
Supplies concentrated beef flavour that is blended with the egg white mixture.

The step that matters

Slowly add the hot beef tea while stirring continuously. Adding the hot liquid gradually while stirring keeps the frothy egg white dispersed evenly, so it can bind impurities instead of scrambling into lumps.

“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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