Home › Food for the Sick › MEAT FOR INVALIDS
MEAT FOR INVALIDS
The following method of rendering raw meat palatable to invalids is given by good authority. To 8.7 ounces of raw meat, from the loin, add 2.6 ounces shelled sweet almonds, .17 ounces shelled bitter almonds, and 2.8 ounces white sugar-these to be beaten together in a marble mortar to a uniform pulp, and the fibers separated by a strainer. The pulp, which has a rosy hue, and a very agreeable taste, does not at all remind one of meat, and may be kept fresh for a considerable time, even in summer, in a dry, cool place. Yolk of egg may be added to it. From this pulp, or directly from the above substance, an emulsion may be prepared which will be rendered still more nutritious by adding milk.
This is a nineteenth-century sickroom preparation rather than a dish, and it cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain what each element of it would do in a modern kitchen and why the page is worth reading rather than cooking.
- Bitter almonds are the disqualifying ingredientBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar accomplishes. They are not sold for food in the United States, and the roughly 5 g called for here is being fed, unheated, to a sick person with no margin for error.
- The meat is never cooked at allRaw loin pounded to a pulp and held for days is an incubator for Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria. Grinding spreads any surface contamination through the whole mass, which is why steak tartare is made to order from a single trimmed piece and eaten immediately.
- "Fresh for a considerable time, even in summer"Sugar at this ratio is nowhere near enough to preserve raw meat; there is no salt, no acid, no nitrite and no heat step. A "dry, cool place" in 1877 meant a cellar or larder, not refrigeration, and pathogen growth in raw minced meat at cellar temperature is rapid.
- Raw egg yolk and raw milkThe optional yolk and the milk emulsion add two more uncooked animal products to a preparation intended for someone whose immune system is already compromised. Invalids, infants and the elderly are precisely the groups current guidance tells you not to serve unpasteurised or raw-egg foods to.
- The strange decimal weights8.7, 2.6, .17 and 2.8 ounces are not kitchen measures. They convert almost exactly to round metric quantities — about 250 g meat, 75 g sweet almonds, 5 g bitter almonds, 80 g sugar — which suggests the figures reached the book from someone working in metric, quite possibly a Continental medical source, though the recipe credits only 'good authority'.
- If you want the idea rather than the recipeThe concept behind it is a high-calorie, easily swallowed protein preparation for someone who cannot chew or keep food down. That job is now done by cooked purées and prescribed nutritional supplements; use a current recipe or follow medical advice.
Raw-meat preparations were a serious branch of nineteenth-century invalid cookery, promoted in Europe for consumption, anaemia and wasting fevers on the theory that cooking destroyed something vital in the flesh; beef tea, scraped raw beef and "meat pulp" all belong to the same family of sickroom foods. The disguise is the point here — almonds, sugar and a rosy colour so that the patient "does not at all remind one of meat," a problem any nurse feeding a nauseated invalid would recognise. Bitter almonds may well be there for the benzaldehyde they supply, the strong marzipan note that Victorian confectioners and pharmacists used routinely and in small quantities; bitter almond essence stayed in domestic use for decades. That Buckeye Cookery prints the formula in converted metric weights, credited only to "good authority," is itself telling.