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BEEF-TEA SOUP
To one pint of "beef essence" (made in a bottle as directed in recipe on a succeeding page), quite hot, add a tea-cup of the best cream, well heated, into which the yolk of a fresh egg has been previously stirred, mix carefully together, and season slightly, and serve. TO PREVENT WEARING THROUGH THE SKIN WHEN BED-RIDDEN. - Apply to tender parts of the body with a feather, a mixture made by beating to a strong froth, the white of an egg, dropping in while beating two tea-spoons spirits of wine. Bottle for use.
A liaison of egg yolk and cream stirred into hot beef essence, from the invalid-cookery section of a book written for households nursing the sick at home. The technique is familiar, but the intended eater is not, and that is where it fails.
- The egg is the problemThe yolk is beaten into heated cream and then stirred into hot liquid off the fire, with no further cooking. Nothing in the method holds the mixture at a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and the dish is explicitly for the convalescent, the elderly and the very ill -- exactly the people for whom an undercooked shell egg carries the greatest consequence.
- "Beef essence" is not stockThe bottle method referred to here is the common nineteenth-century one: lean beef sealed in a corked bottle and stood in a pan of water, the juice pressed out afterward. The companion recipe is on a later page and is not reproduced here, so its exact timing and heat are unknown; period instructions of this type vary a good deal, and without a stated temperature or duration there is no way to know the essence itself is safe.
- Unpasteurised dairy"the best cream" in a household book of this date would almost certainly have been raw cream skimmed from the pan. The recipe heats it but never directs a boil, and "well heated" is not a standard anyone can verify.
- A tea-cupFor reference in reading the book: a period tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, usually reckoned somewhere between about 4 and 6 fl oz rather than 8. A gill is 4 fl oz, half a modern cup.
- The second paragraph is not foodThe note on bedsores has been run in from the same page. Spirits of wine is ethyl alcohol; the egg-white and alcohol wash was a standard nursing dressing and has nothing to do with the soup.
- If you want beef teaUse a current recipe with stated temperatures, pasteurised eggs and pasteurised cream. Nothing about the historical text should be taken as a set of workable instructions.
Beef tea sat at the centre of nineteenth-century sick-room cookery, and household manuals of the period commonly carry a page or two of it. The belief behind it was that the strength of meat lay in its juice rather than its fibre, so the fibre was pressed, bottled or squeezed and the liquid given to patients who could keep nothing else down. Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing (1859) discusses beef tea at length, though she cautioned that it carried little nutritive value; commercial products such as Liebig's Extract of Meat later traded on the same general idea. The nutritional reasoning was largely wrong: pressed beef juice is mostly water, with salts and soluble extractives and very little protein, which may be why enriching versions like this one add cream and egg yolk. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio and first published in 1877, devotes a section to "Food For The Sick," and the same pages mix cookery with dressings, poultices and bedside hints without any dividing line.