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BEEF-TEA
Cut pound best lean steak in small pieces, place in glass fruitjar (a perfect one), cover tightly and set in a pot of cold water; heat gradually to boil, and continue this steadily three or four hours, until the meat is like white rags and the juice thoroughly extracted; season with very little salt, and strain through a wire strainer. Serve either warm or cold. To prevent jar toppling over, tie a string around the top part, and hang over a stick laid across the top of pot. When done, set kettle off stove and let cool before removing the jar, and in this way prevent breakage. Or, when beeftea is wanted for immediate use, place in a common pint bowl (yellow ware), add very little water, cover with saucer, and place in a moderate oven; if in danger of burning add a little more water. To make beef-tea more palatable for some patients, freeze it.
A sickroom extraction rather than a soup: the point is to draw the soluble juices out of lean beef with gentle, prolonged heat and no direct contact with water. Two methods are given, the jar-in-a-pot and the covered bowl in the oven.
- Do not seal the jar"Cover tightly" meant a lid set firmly in place, not a modern screw band torqued down. Heated three or four hours, a genuinely airtight jar builds pressure and can fail. Rest the lid on loosely, or use a heatproof jar with the ring only finger-tight, so steam can escape.
- Use a jar rated for heatA tempered canning jar handles this; decorative or recycled jars do not. The instruction to let everything cool in the water before lifting the jar out is sound and worth keeping — thermal shock is what breaks glass here.
- Moderate ovenFor the second method, read "moderate" as 325-350F. The bowl needs a cover (the saucer) or the surface dries and scorches before the juices run.
- Yellow wareCommon cheap glazed earthenware of the period. Any covered ovenproof stoneware or ceramic bowl does the same job.
- The endpoint"Like white rags" is the real instruction: the meat should look pale, fibrous and exhausted. If the shreds still look pink, the extraction is not finished.
- Yield is smallA pound of steak gives only a small quantity of concentrated liquid, an invalid serving or two rather than a bowl of soup. Buy the leanest cut you can and trim hard; fat is one of the things that makes beef tea unpalatable.
- Chill and lift the fatCooled, the liquid may set to a soft jelly, and any fat rises as a cap that lifts off cleanly. This is easier than skimming warm and gives a clearer result when reheated.
- Freezing itThe final line is not a garnish idea. Frozen to a slush, beef tea is easier for a nauseated or feverish patient to take than a warm savoury drink, and the cold mutes the flavour.
- What it is notBeef tea carries salts and flavour compounds but almost no protein — the nourishment stays behind in the white rags. Treat it as a warm, salty drink, not as food.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery," a fixture of household manuals like Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in the 1870s) at a time when nursing the sick at home was an ordinary domestic skill and a section of the cookbook was given over to it. The technique — water bath, hours of low heat — was meant to capture everything volatile that open boiling would drive off, a logic much like that behind the commercial meat extracts sold in jars from mid-century onward. Its reputation as nourishment did not survive scrutiny: Florence Nightingale noted in Notes on Nursing that chemistry found almost no solid nourishment in beef tea, though she still recommended it for the sick, and by the early twentieth century chemists were describing it as a stimulant and appetiser rather than a food. The instruction to freeze it, in the last sentence, is the most practical thing on the page.