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Extract of Beef
This should be made the day before it is required for use, kept cold, skimmed of all fat and warmed up. Mince one pound of lean beef to each pint of extract required. Place in a jar with a closely fitting top (if luted, so much the better), or in a bottle tightly-corked. Place the vessel in another of cold water and set on the stove where it will heat slowly. When the water boils, move to where it will simmer, adding boiling water as the water boils away, so as to keep the inner vessel pretty well submerged to the top. Let it cook for three or four hours; strain through a cloth, and when cold remove any fat that may appear. When warmed up for use, a teaspoonful of cream may be added to each teacupful of extract, or a very little corn-starch or arrowroot.
Beef Tea. A weaker extract or broth may be made in a covered saucepan with a quart of water to each pound of chopped beef; simmer until the water has evapoof water to each pound of chopped beef; simmer until the water has evaporated down to a pint.
An invalid-cookery staple: meat juice drawn out by long, gentle heat in a sealed jar standing in simmering water, with no water added to the meat itself. The method is sound; a few details need translating.
- Never let it boil hardThe point of the water bath is that the jar's contents stay below a rolling boil, so the extract stays clear and savoury rather than turning grey and scummy. Once the outer pan boils, drop it to a bare simmer and hold it there.
- Do not seal the jar tightA tightly corked bottle or a luted lid heated for four hours can build pressure and burst. Use a canning jar with the ring only finger-tight, or a lid set on loosely, so steam can escape.
- "Luted"Luting meant sealing the join between lid and vessel with a stiff paste, usually flour and water, a term the kitchen shared with the laboratory. It is unnecessary here and works against safe venting.
- No water in the meatThe extract proper is made from beef alone — the liquid is what the meat gives up. The pint-per-pound figure is the expected yield, not an instruction to add a pint of water.
- The beefUse genuinely lean beef, trimmed of every scrap of fat and gristle: shin, skirt or lean chuck. Fat is the main thing you will otherwise spend the next day skimming off.
- Keep the outer pan topped upFour hours will boil away a good deal of water. Add boiling water, not cold, so the bath never drops off temperature.
- ThickeningThe recipe allows only "a very little" cornstarch or arrowroot (the teaspoonful measure belongs to the cream, per teacupful); slake the starch in a little cold extract first, then stir it in and bring just to the point of thickening.
- Yield and keepingOne pound of beef gives roughly a cup to a pint of extract. Made a day ahead as directed, it must be refrigerated, and treated as any cooked meat stock — three or four days at most, or frozen.
- What it is notBeef tea and meat extracts carry very little protein; they are essentially flavoured broth (the commercial extracts are also very salty). They were prescribed as nourishment for the sick on the belief that they concentrated the strength of meat, which they do not.
Extract of beef belongs to a whole nineteenth-century literature of sick-room cookery, in which broths, jellies and "beef teas" were dosed out to invalids much as medicine was. Its scientific prestige came largely from Justus von Liebig, the German chemist whose work in the 1840s and 1860s popularised concentrated meat extract as a restorative and led to the commercial products that carried his name — so that by the time this book appeared, a housewife making her own extract had a bought equivalent to compare it with. The sealed vessel standing in a pan of simmering water is the domestic form of the water bath, and the vocabulary overlaps: "luting" a jar shut is a term shared with the apothecary. Later nutritional analysis showed the extracts to be mostly water, gelatin, salts and flavour compounds, but they persisted in nursery and sick-room chapters for decades because they were warm, savoury and easily swallowed.