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RAW BEEF
Chop fresh, lean beef (the best steak or roast) very fine, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and put between thin slices of Graham or white buttered-bread. This is a very nutritious diet.
This is a raw beef sandwich prescribed as invalid food. The problems are not with the technique but with the premise, and they cannot be corrected by adjusting the method.
- No kill step at allNothing in the recipe brings the beef to any temperature. Whole cuts carry bacteria mainly on the cut surface, but chopping "very fine" works that surface contamination evenly through the whole mass, which is exactly why ground beef is treated as higher risk than steak.
- The specific pathogensShiga toxin-producing E. coli, including O157:H7, is the central concern in raw beef and needs only a very small dose to cause illness; Salmonella, Campylobacter and Listeria are also in play. None of these were understood when this book was written.
- The intended eater is the worst candidateThis appears under Food For The Sick. The people served from that chapter, the feverish, the convalescent, the very old and the very young, are the ones for whom an E. coli infection is most likely to progress to hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure.
- Salt and pepper do nothingSeasoning is not a preservative at these quantities and has no antimicrobial effect worth counting. Neither does the butter or the bread.
- "Fresh" is not a safeguardFreshness was often taken as a proxy for safety, on the assumption that spoilage announces itself by smell. Pathogenic contamination does not, and meat that smells and looks perfect can carry an infectious dose.
- If you want a raw beef dishSteak tartare and carpaccio are still made, but they depend on a whole intact cut handled under controlled conditions and ground or sliced to order, not on the household chopping bowl. Follow a current recipe from a source that addresses sourcing and handling, and do not serve it to anyone who is ill.
- Graham breadFor reference, the "Graham" bread named here is bread of coarse unsifted whole wheat flour, promoted by Sylvester Graham and common in period baking chapters.
Raw and lightly cooked beef preparations were standard medical food in the second half of the nineteenth century, when beef was thought to carry a concentrated, easily absorbed vitality that cooking drove off. Household books of the 1870s and 1880s are full of the family: beef tea, expressed beef juice pressed from a lightly seared steak, scraped beef pulp, and sandwiches like this one, all pressed on typhoid and consumption patients who could keep little else down. The reasoning is usually understood to have been nutritional rather than reckless, since the germ theory of foodborne disease was only then taking hold and the link between ground beef and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli would not be established until the 1980s. Buckeye Cookery, compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions and first published in 1877, appears to reflect the ordinary medical advice of its day, and similar sickroom advice can be found in other books of the period.