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RICE WATER
Wash four table-spoons of rice; put it into two quarts of water, which boil down to one quart, and then add sugar and a little nutmeg. This makes a pleasant drink. A pint or half a pint of milk added to the rice water, before it is taken from the fire, gives a nourishing food suitable for cases of diarrhea. Sago, tapioca, barley, or cracked corn can be prepared in the same manner. BEEF TEA. Take a pound of juicy lean beef and mince it. Put it with its juice into an earthen vessel containing a pint of tepid water, and let the whole stand for one hour. Slowly heat to boiling point, and let boil for three minutes. Strain liquid through a colander, and stir in a little salt. If preferred, a little pepper or allspice may be added. MUTTON TEA may be prepared in the same way. It makes an agreeable change when the patient has become tired of beef tea.
Two convalescent drinks in one entry: a rice decoction and a meat infusion. Both are simple, but the proportions are the whole point — these are meant to be thin, and cooking them down further turns them into porridge and gravy.
- Reduction is the measurementTwo quarts of water down to one is the instruction that governs the whole recipe. Four tablespoons of rice in a quart of liquid gives a cloudy, faintly starchy drink; if it thickens to a gruel you have gone too far and should thin it back with hot water.
- Rice choiceUse ordinary long- or medium-grain white rice. Modern parboiled or converted rice releases much less starch and gives a watery result, and brown rice contributes bran flavour the original never intended.
- YieldAbout four cups of rice water, or five to six once the milk goes in, depending on whether half a pint or a full pint is used — roughly four to six servings for an invalid taking a cup at a time. It separates on standing, so stir or reheat gently before serving.
- The milk versionThe recipe adds the milk while the pan is still on the fire, just before it comes off. Do not let it return to a hard boil or it will catch on the pan bottom and taste scorched.
- Substitute grainsSago and tapioca here mean the small pearl form, which needs soaking and swells far more than rice — start with half the quantity. Barley means pearl barley; "cracked corn" is coarsely broken dried corn, closer in texture to grits than to fine meal.
- Beef tea is not stockThe hour-long soak in tepid water is doing the extraction, not the cooking. Skipping it and simply simmering the meat gives a broth with a quite different, cooked flavour. Use lean chuck or round, minced or very finely chopped, and keep every drop of juice.
- "An earthen vessel"Any non-reactive bowl — glass, glazed ceramic, stainless — then transfer to a saucepan to heat. Heat slowly and skim; three minutes at a boil is enough to set the proteins so they can be strained out.
- Strain properlyA colander alone will let fine sediment through. Line it with muslin or use a fine sieve for a clear tea, and season lightly — beef tea is meant to taste of beef, not salt.
- KeepingBoth preparations are low in salt and acid and were made fresh each time for good reason. Refrigerate promptly and use within a day.
"Food for the sick" was a standard department in nineteenth-century household manuals, and it carried real weight in an era when nursing happened at home and a fever might run for weeks. The thinking behind these recipes owed something to older humoral and dietetic ideas and something to the meat-extract chemistry of the period: invalid food should be bland, thin, and easily swallowed, and strength was believed to be extractable from meat into a liquid the patient could drink. Beef tea was the most famous product of that belief, prescribed across Britain and America and later mass-produced as commercial beef extract; that such infusions carry very little protein was being demonstrated and argued over from the later nineteenth century onward, whatever their appeal to a tired appetite. Rice water belongs to an older and better-founded tradition: rice-water drinks for digestive complaints appear in medical writing for centuries, and rice water is still used in oral rehydration practice in parts of Asia. The instruction to add milk "for cases of diarrhea" reflects period advice rather than current guidance, and the casual list of interchangeable grains at the end — sago, tapioca, barley, cracked corn — shows how much these entries were understood as a method rather than a fixed formula.