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BEEF BROTH
Cut in small pieces one pound of good lean beef; put on in two quarts of cold water and boil slowly, keeping it well covered, one and one-half hours; then add half a tea-cup tapioca, which has been soaked three-quarters of an hour in water enough to cover, and boil half an hour longer. Some add, with the tapioca, a small bit of parsley, and a slice or two of onion. Strain before serving, seasoning slightly with pepper and salt. It is more strengthening to add, just before serving, a soft poached egg. Rice may be used instead of tapioca, straining the broth, and adding one or two table-spoons rice (soaked for a short time), and then boiling half an hour.
An invalid's broth from the sickroom chapter, built on the old logic that meat juices plus a starch make a food both nourishing and easy to swallow. It works as written; the details below are where nineteenth-century kitchen shorthand needs translating.
- "Boil slowly" means a bare simmerA rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine protein into the liquid, giving a cloudy, greasy broth that no straining will fix. Hold it at 180-190F, with only occasional bubbles breaking the surface, and skim the grey foam in the first fifteen minutes.
- The tea-cupA tea-cup in nineteenth-century recipes is generally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup; half a tea-cup of tapioca works out to somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 cup. Since the measure is genuinely imprecise, start at the low end - tapioca swells considerably and will turn the broth to porridge if overdone.
- Use pearl tapioca, not instantThe soaking step only makes sense for small pearl tapioca, which is what an 1877 kitchen had. Modern instant or minute tapioca needs no soak and will dissolve to gluey slurry over half an hour of simmering.
- Meat and yieldOne pound of lean beef - shin, chuck or round - in two quarts of water. The recipe keeps the pot well covered throughout, so evaporation over the two hours is limited and the finished yield will not be far short of the two quarts you started with. The recipe says nothing further about the meat after the straining.
- Strain, then correct the fatStrain through a fine sieve or a doubled cloth. If the broth is to be kept, chill it and lift the set fat off the top - far more effective than skimming warm liquid.
- The poached eggA soft-poached egg has a liquid yolk. For a healthy adult that is an ordinary risk; for the sick person this dish was written for, and for anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use a pasteurised egg or cook the yolk through.
- The rice versionThe recipe allows one or two tablespoons of rice for half an hour, which suits long-grain white rice. Note the order the recipe gives: strain the broth first, then add the rice, so the grains stay whole in a clear liquid.
- SeasoningThe original salts lightly and late, which is right - the liquid concentrates as it cooks. Season only after straining and after any reduction is finished.
Buckeye Cookery, like many American household manuals of its generation, carries a chapter on cookery for invalids, and beef broth stands at the head of that tradition. Nineteenth-century medicine held that illness depleted the body of substance which had to be replaced in the most concentrated and least taxing form possible, and beef tea, beef essence and broths of this kind were prescribed as much as they were cooked - the same thinking that made commercial beef extracts a large industry in the same decades. The tapioca and rice here are doing two jobs: adding easily digested starch, and giving the broth enough body to feel like a meal to someone who cannot manage one. The soft poached egg added at the last minute, described as "more strengthening," reflects a period faith in eggs as a near-medicinal food. Modern nutrition has retired most of these claims - broth is thin stuff nutritionally - but the dish survives on its real merits: it is warm, salty, easy to keep down, and someone has to make it for you.