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Beef Tea from Fresh Meat
Take one pound of lean beef, entirely free from fat and sinew; mince it finely and mix it well with one pint of cold water. Put it on the hob, and let it remain heating very gradually for two hours. At the end of that time, add half a tea-spoonful of salt and boil gently for ten minutes. Remove the scum as it rises. This is beef tea pure and simple. When a change of flavour is required, it is a good plan to take one pound of meat composed of equal parts of veal, mutton, and beef, and proceed as above. Or, instead of using water, boil a carrot, a turnip, an onion, and a clove, in a pint of water, and when the flavour is extracted strain the liquid through a fine sieve; let it get quite cold, and pour it upon the minced meat, soaking and boiling it for the same time. Probable cost, 1s. per pint. Sufficient for one pint of beef tea.
A sickroom staple rather than a soup, and the method is deliberately gentle: the point is to draw soluble protein and flavour out of the meat without setting it into hard grey shreds. Two things need translating for a modern range — the hob, and the imperial pint.
- The hinge: heat, do not simmerThe two-hour extraction is meant to sit well below a simmer: hot enough to steam faintly but never bubbling. The recipe names no temperature; modern cooks attempting it generally aim somewhere in the region of 150-160F. Held much hotter, the meat proteins coagulate and the liquid turns cloudy and thin-tasting; the final ten-minute boil is there to clarify and to make the tea safe, not to cook the beef.
- "Put it on the hob"A Victorian hob was the flat ledge beside the open range fire, used for holding pans at a low steady heat. A gas or electric burner on its lowest setting is usually still too hot; use a diffuser, a double boiler, or a 150F oven with the pan covered.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or a little under 2 1/2 US cups (about 570 ml). Expect to recover somewhat less than that after two hours of heating and skimming, so start with a little extra water or keep the pan lidded.
- Mince it finelyHand-chopped or coarsely ground lean beef gives more surface area than cubes and extracts far better. Pre-packed ground beef works but is fattier than the recipe wants; trim a piece of top round or shin yourself if you can.
- Free from fat and sinewThis is not fussiness. Fat that renders out is a nuisance to clear completely, and the result can taste greasy, particularly if the tea is taken cold or jellied.
- The vegetable variantCarrot, turnip, onion and a single clove simmered in the pint of water, strained, and cooled completely before it touches the meat. The cooling matters: pouring hot stock onto raw mince starts the proteins coagulating immediately and defeats the slow extraction.
- Holding and storingOnce boiled and skimmed, chill it quickly and use within two days, or freeze it. It may set to a light jelly when cold, though meat trimmed this lean carries little connective tissue to gel with.
- Yield and costOne pint, as stated; the recipe says nothing about how it should be divided among servings. The 'probable cost, 1s.' is a shilling per pint, a real outlay for a household feeding a sick relative.
Beef tea belongs to the branch of Victorian cookery known as invalid or sickroom cookery, which occupied whole chapters of household manuals. The reasoning of the period held that the nourishment of meat lay in its soluble "extractive matter" — an idea associated with the chemist Justus von Liebig, whose meat extract was sold commercially from the 1860s — so a clear brown liquid drawn from a pound of beef was thought to concentrate the strength of the whole joint. Modern nutrition takes a dimmer view: most of the protein stays behind in the exhausted meat fibres, and what dissolves is largely gelatin, salts and flavour compounds. The recipe survives less as a tonic than as a lesson in low-temperature extraction, and the instruction to skim, to keep the meat lean, and to cool the vegetable stock before use are all sound stock-making practice whatever the patient's condition.