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SUET MILK (Invalid Cookery)
Take an ounce of finely-shredded mutton suet and add it to a pint of new milk. Set over a very slow fire, in an enamelled saucepan, and let the suet dissolve gently. Flavour with a little nutmeg or mixed spice. Serve as hot as possible, and heat the vessel and spoon. Any cooked cereal or malted food may be added to the milk.
A fortified hot milk from the invalid-cookery tradition, where the object was to get fat and calories into someone who could not manage solid food. It is drinkable if kept scrupulously hot, and unpleasant the moment it cools.
- Keep it below a simmerThe hinge is temperature control at both ends. Mutton suet needs roughly 115-120F to melt but the milk must never boil, or it will skin and catch; hold it around 150-160F and stir until the suet has gone clear. A heavy pan or a bowl over hot water gives more control than direct heat.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the cow, untreated and with the cream still in it. Ordinary pasteurised whole milk is the sensible substitute; skimmed milk defeats the purpose of the dish.
- Mutton suetHard kidney fat from a sheep, bought from the butcher and shredded fine before use. It is now a specialist order in most places. Packaged shredded beef suet is the usual stand-in, though it carries none of the mutton flavour the original assumed.
- An enamelled saucepanProbably specified because the bare metal of period pans could taint milk. Any modern stainless or enamelled pan does the job; the instruction is about the cooking surface, not about shape.
- Heat the cup and the spoonNot fussiness. Melted suet sets at a temperature well above body heat, so a cold cup will throw a greasy film onto the surface almost at once. Rinse the cup and spoon in boiling water and serve immediately.
- Malted foodA branded malted-milk powder of the Horlicks type, then sold as an invalid and infant food. A tablespoon whisked in at the end is the modern equivalent. "Any cooked cereal" means a thin oat or arrowroot gruel, already cooked and strained, stirred in to thicken.
- QuantityOne ounce of suet to a pint of milk is about 28 g to 570 ml, giving two generous cups. That is a very rich drink by current standards; half the suet is closer to what most people would tolerate.
Cassell's, like many large domestic manuals of the period, carried a section of invalid cookery, and it reflects a medicine that had few drugs and a great deal of feeding. Before antibiotics, wasting illnesses -- tuberculosis above all -- were treated largely by rest, air and feeding, and suet, cream, cod-liver oil and beef tea were among the standard vehicles. Suet milk is an attempt to deliver concentrated animal fat in a form a patient with no appetite might swallow. The spice is there for palatability rather than flavour in any culinary sense, and the insistence on heated cup and spoon shows the author knew perfectly well how quickly the drink becomes repellent. It reads now less as a recipe than as a record of what sickroom nursing looked like when feeding was among the few reliable treatments on offer.