Important: Safety Warning
This page gives first-aid or emergency advice that predates modern medicine and can make an emergency worse. Do not follow it. In any medical emergency, call emergency services and follow current first-aid guidance.
In addition, this page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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RAW BEEF FOR CHILDREN
Take half a pound of juicy beef, free from any fat; mince it very finely; then rub it into a smooth pulp either in a mortar or with an ordinary potato-masher, and press it through a fine sieve. Spread a little out upon a plate and sprinkle over it some salt, or some sugar if the child prefers it. Give it alone or spread upon a buttered slice of stale bread. It makes an excellent food for children with dysentery. Beauty and health constitute a royal inheritance. The child born with such a heritage, and brought up by a mother who has the good sense to discard soothing syrups, narcotics and cordials, and carefully trains up to cleanly habits, proper exercise, plenty of air and sunshine, and wholesome food, starts in life with a capital that will in the long run tip the balance against the largest fortune in dollars. To keep health and beauty, or to restore it when lost, it is necessary to observe the laws of health, discarding quackery and panaceas of all kinds as superstitions, and inventions of the devil. Pure air and plenty of it, free sunshine and plenty of it, are better restoratives than all the patent medicines under the sun. Too often the doctor brings the medicine only to have the medicine bring the doctor again. The sunlight will give a lady's cheek a fresher tinge and a more delicate complexion than all the French powders and rouge in Paris.
This is raw minced beef fed uncooked to a sick child, and there is no version of that which is safe in a modern kitchen. The points below explain the specific hazards rather than how to proceed.
- The core problem: no kill stepNothing in the method brings the beef above room temperature. Mincing, pounding and sieving distribute any surface bacteria throughout the mass and increase the surface area available to them, so the pulp is a worse risk than the whole cut it came from.
- E. coli O157:H7 and childrenShiga toxin-producing E. coli is the specific reason raw ground beef is treated as a serious hazard today. Children under five are the group most likely to develop hemolytic uremic syndrome, a cause of acute kidney failure. A child already losing fluid to diarrhea is the worst possible patient for it.
- Salmonella and CampylobacterBoth can be present on raw beef, and both cause diarrhoea that may be bloody. Giving raw meat for dysentery risks compounding the illness it is prescribed for.
- Standing at room temperatureThe pulp is spread on a plate, salted or sugared and served at leisure. Small amounts of salt or sugar at these levels do nothing to inhibit bacterial growth; they only season.
- Not the same as steak tartareRestaurant tartare relies on whole intact muscle ground to order under inspection, and it is still not served to children, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised. A home mortar and a sieve do not approximate that.
- If you came here for sickroom feedingRehydration and current pediatric guidance have replaced every nineteenth-century invalid diet for dysentery. Consult a clinician and use a current source; there is no adaptation of this page worth making.
- The essay that followsThe paragraph about air, sunshine and the rejection of soothing syrups is not part of the method. It is filler typical of the period's household manuals, and the swipe at narcotic cordials was aimed at opium-based preparations then sold for teething infants.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from Ohio contributors) devotes a full section to "Food for the Sick," reflecting a period when nursing an invalid at home was the household's job and diet was regarded as the principal treatment. Raw or barely warmed beef preparations, including scraped beef, beef juice pressed from a warmed steak, and raw beef pulp of this kind, appear across English and American invalid cookery from roughly the 1860s through the early twentieth century; the rationale usually given was that meat fibre would irritate an inflamed bowel while its "essence" would nourish without digestion. That reasoning predates germ theory's acceptance in everyday practice and any understanding of foodborne pathogens in ground meat. The concluding sermon on sunshine and against patent medicines belongs to the same moment: the American nostrum trade was flourishing in the 1870s and would run on until federal regulation, and some cookbook writers also wrote as health reformers warning mothers off the opium-laced syrups then sold freely over the counter.