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Raw Beef Tea
Made by allowing one ounce of fine chopped lean beef to each tablespoonful of cold water. Let them stand together fifteen minutes, strain and season to taste. For any of the above recipes the fiber of the meat may be scraped away with a knife.
Broths. Broths are made and thickened in the usual way, but care must be taken to strain, and skim off all fat.
Raw beef tea was a sickroom staple built on the belief that heat destroyed the "vital" goodness of meat. It is an uncooked infusion of raw beef in cold water, served to the people least able to withstand a foodborne infection, and it should be read as a historical document rather than followed.
- Nothing here is ever cookedThe beef is steeped in cold water for fifteen minutes and strained. No step brings the meat or the liquid anywhere near the 160F/71C that would reduce bacterial load, and the resulting liquid carries whatever was on and in the raw beef.
- The specific pathogen riskChopped or minced beef distributes surface organisms — E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, Campylobacter — throughout the mass, which is why ground beef is treated far more cautiously than a whole steak. A short cold soak actively extracts them into the drink.
- The intended drinker is the wrong drinkerBeef tea of this kind was invalid food, given to the sick and convalescent. Those are precisely the groups in whom a low infective dose causes serious illness, including haemolytic uraemic syndrome in children.
- Standing time makes it worse, not betterStanding time -- The meat and water are left to stand together, and the recipe gives no refrigeration and no holding limit; fifteen minutes is short, but nothing in the method reduces what the raw beef brought with it.
- The nutritional premise is falseCold water for a quarter of an hour extracts salts, some soluble proteins and the red myoglobin that gave the drink its convincing colour. It does not extract meaningful protein or energy, so the drink carries the full risk for almost no nourishment.
- Scraping does not helpScraping -- The note about scraping the fibre away with a knife yields a finer pulp, which exposes more surface area; it does nothing to reduce what is in the raw meat.
- If you want beef teaUse a current recipe for a simmered beef broth or stock, brought properly to temperature and cooled and stored under modern guidance.
Beef tea was a mainstay of invalid cookery through the middle and later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and household manuals of the period often carried more than one version: simmered, expressed under pressure, or — as here — raw. The raw variety belonged to a school of thought which held that cooking coagulated albumen and drove off the essential virtues of flesh; ideas about meat extracts circulated widely in this period, and commercial products such as Liebig's Extract and later Bovril traded on them. Raw or cold-infused beef juice was recommended in some medical writing for the seriously ill, and the deep red colour was taken as visible proof of strength. Later analysis showed that beef tea of any kind is nearly all water, gelatine and salts, its stimulating effect closer to that of a savoury drink than a food, and the raw versions faded from print as bacteriology took hold.