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Beef Tea, Strong
Allow two pounds of lean meat to one quart of water, put it into a jar, which place in a pan of boiling water. The meat should be well cut up, and the top of the jar secured so that no water may enter. Boil gently for four or five hours, strain and squeeze out all the tea. This may be flavoured with onion, clove, etc., according to the taste of the invalid and strength of the stomach. Sufficient to make a pint of tea.
A sickroom staple rather than a soup, made by the gentlest possible extraction so the liquid stays clear and savoury. The whole method hinges on the water bath: the tea itself must never boil.
- The jar in the panThis is a bain-marie. A wide-mouthed canning jar or a heatproof pudding basin set on a folded cloth or trivet in a deep saucepan works; the water should come two-thirds up the jar and be topped up as it evaporates. Cover the jar tightly, as instructed, or condensation and pan water will dilute the tea.
- "Boil gently" means the outer panThe recipe has the jar standing in boiling water, and the gentle boil applies to that outer pan rather than to the contents. In practice a bare simmer is enough. If the contents of the jar are allowed to boil hard, the albumin coagulates in grey flecks and the tea goes cloudy and flat instead of clear and beefy. Four to five hours at low heat is not excessive here.
- Oven alternativeA covered jar standing in a roasting tin of hot water can be held in a low oven for the same four to five hours, which needs less watching than a stovetop pan. The recipe itself gives no oven method.
- The meatThe recipe asks only for lean meat: shin, skirt or lean chuck, with every scrap of fat and sinew removed. "Well cut up" means small dice or a coarse mince, the finer the better for extraction.
- Straining and squeezingPress the meat hard through a fine sieve or muslin, as directed, then chill the tea and lift off the disc of set fat before reheating. Invalid cookery of the period was emphatic that beef tea should be served free of grease.
- SeasoningSalt is not mentioned but is wanted; add it after straining, to taste. A clove or a slice of onion, as the recipe suggests, goes in with the meat at the start.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of meat and a quart of water give about a pint, as the recipe states, or two generous invalid servings. It is a low-acid stock and spoils quickly: refrigerate at once and use within two days, or freeze in small portions.
- What it is and isn'tBeef tea carries flavour, gelatin, salts and very little protein, most of which stays behind in the squeezed-out meat. It is a restorative drink, not nourishment, and modern readers should treat it as a light savoury broth rather than a substitute for food.
Beef tea belonged to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery," a fixture of household manuals like Cassell's, where the sickroom was the housekeeper's responsibility and clear, easily swallowed liquids were thought suitable for a weakened digestion; the closing phrase about "the strength of the stomach" is a direct echo of that thinking. Faith in it was reinforced by the chemist Justus von Liebig, whose meat extract, marketed from the 1860s, was widely believed to concentrate the nourishing essence of beef. Later analysis showed that the protein largely stays in the pressed-out meat and that what dissolves is flavour, gelatin and mineral salts, and Florence Nightingale had already written sceptically of relying on beef tea to sustain a patient. The recipe survives now less as medicine than as a technique lesson: slow, sub-boiling extraction in a sealed vessel is exactly how a clear, deeply flavoured broth is still made.