Skip to main content
Dessert

Beef Tea Custard

A custard made with beef tea, egg yolks, egg white, and salt, steamed in a buttered cup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Beat the egg yolks and egg white together until well combined.

  2. Pour the beef tea into the egg mixture and season with salt.

  3. Prepare a well-buttered cup and pour in the mixture.

  4. Cover the cup with a buttered paper.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the cup in a stewpan with a little boiling water.

  2. Steam gently for about 20 minutes.

  3. Carefully turn out the custard and serve hot or cold, or cut into dice and serve in broth or soup.

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

Egg yolks
Set the custard into a soft, tender structure as they cook.
Egg white
Adds protein that helps the custard set firmly and hold its shape.
Beef tea
Provides the liquid base and the savoury beef flavour of the custard.

The step that matters

Steam gently for about 20 minutes. Egg custards turn grainy, watery, or spongy when cooked too hard. Gentle steaming with water kept at a simmer heats the egg proteins slowly so they set evenly into a smooth, delicate custard.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes