Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef Tea of Mixed Meat
Beef Tea of Mixed Meat
To some invalids the taste of beef tea is unwelcome; the flavour is much improved by the following mixture. Take equal quantities of beef, mutton, and veal, one pound of each, without fat, put them, cut up in small pieces, to simmer four hours in three pints of water. When boiling, skim thoroughly and draw the saucepan aside, that the juices may be extracted without any waste of the liquid. Strain and serve with dry toast in any form. Time, four hours. Cost of meat, about 1s. per pound.
A Victorian invalid broth: three pounds of lean meat surrendered to three pints of water over four hours. It is a clear, unthickened extract rather than a stock, and it depends entirely on heat control.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: heat control -- "Draw the saucepan aside" means moving it to the cool edge of a range so it barely trembles. Note that the recipe does bring the pot up to boiling first, in order to skim it, and only then draws it aside. A sustained rolling boil emulsifies fat and albumin into the liquid and turns it cloudy and greasy, which defeats the purpose of a clear extract.
- Quantities and yieldQuantities -- Three pounds of meat to three pints (about 1.7 litres) of water. The recipe gives no finished yield; four hours of simmering and straining will leave appreciably less liquid than went in.
- Cutting the meat"Small pieces" is not defined; small dice or coarse mincing is the usual reading. Surface area is what drives extraction, and large chunks give a weaker result.
- Veal and mutton todayVeal is available but expensive; a lean shin or shoulder cut is what is wanted, not a cutlet. Mutton has largely vanished from British and American butchers — lamb shoulder or neck substitutes, though the flavour is milder than the recipe intends. Any lean cut, such as shin, will serve for the beef portion.
- SkimmingSkim as it comes up to temperature and again once or twice during the first hour. The grey scum is coagulated protein, not dirt, but it clouds the tea if left to break up.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified. Salt to taste at the end, off the heat.
- Fat"Without fat" is an instruction to trim, not a guarantee. Chill the strained liquid and lift the set fat off the top before reheating; a warm beef tea with fat floating on it was considered a failure.
- CostA shilling a pound is consistent with British meat prices over much of the second half of the nineteenth century, and three shillings of meat for a few cups of broth was a real expense. The spent meat retains little flavour.
Beef tea belonged to the sickroom rather than the dining room, and Victorian cookery books commonly carry a section of "invalid cookery" in which it features. The underlying belief — traceable to Liebig's mid-century work on meat extracts, which also gave rise to the commercial bottled extracts sold under his name — was that the soluble juices of meat carried its nourishment, and that a patient who could not digest solids could still be fed on the essence. Nutritional science later showed this to be largely wrong: what dissolves into the water is flavour, gelatine and minerals, while the protein stays behind in the exhausted meat. That does not make the drink useless, and warm salted broth remains a reasonable thing to give someone with no appetite. The mixture of three meats here is a flavour dodge rather than a medical one; the recipe says as much, opening with the observation that the taste of beef tea is unwelcome to some invalids.