Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veal Tea for Infants and Invalids
Veal Tea for Infants and Invalids
Take and cut into small pieces a pound of lean veal, sprinkle a little salt over them, put them into a saucepan, and pour upon them a pint of cold water. Let the liquor boil, and skim carefully, then simmer gently for an hour. Pour out the broth, strain it, and it will be ready for use. To thicken it, mix a tea-spoonful of arrowroot with a table-spoonful of cold water, and stir the boiling tea slowly into this, or boil a spoonful of arrowroot or sago in the liquor a quarter of an hour before using it. A little new milk may be added to the tea occasionally for the sake of variety. Time to simmer the tea, one hour. Probable cost, veal, 11d. per pound. The above ingredients are sufficient for a breakfast-cupful of tea.
A plain invalid broth of the sort every nineteenth-century household kept in its repertoire. It works as written; the only real skill is keeping the heat low enough that the liquid stays clear.
- Never let it boil after skimmingA hard boil emulsifies fat and drives out fine protein, turning the tea cloudy and greyish. Bring it up once, skim the scum, then hold it at a bare tremble for the hour.
- What cut to buyVeal shoulder or leg, trimmed of all fat and sinew, chopped to roughly half-inch dice. The finer the cut, the more is extracted in an hour. Ground veal works and extracts faster, but the broth needs a finer strain, ideally through muslin.
- Yield and reductionA pint of water with a pound of meat gives about a breakfast cupful after an hour's simmering and straining, as the original says. Do not top up the water partway or the strength is lost.
- Skim the fat twiceOnce during cooking, and again after chilling, when what remains sets on top and lifts off in a disc. Cold-skimmed broth is far more palatable to someone with no appetite.
- Arrowroot, and why the order mattersSlake the teaspoon of arrowroot in a tablespoon of cold water first, then pour the hot tea into the slurry while stirring, exactly as written. Tipping dry starch into hot liquid gives lumps, and arrowroot thins again if held at a boil, so thicken off the heat and serve at once.
- Sago takes longerThe alternative given is a spoonful of arrowroot or sago boiled in the liquor for a quarter of an hour. That timing suits old-fashioned pearl sago; modern small pearl tapioca or sago will generally soften more quickly, so check it rather than relying on the full fifteen minutes.
- Salt and infantsThe pinch of salt is for flavour in an adult convalescent. Current paediatric guidance is that infants should not be given added salt, and that meat broths carry very little in the way of usable nutrition for a baby; a doctor's advice, not a cookbook's, governs feeding a sick child.
- Keeping itUnsalted, unthickened meat broth spoils quickly. Chill it fast, refrigerate, and use within two days, or freeze in single-cup portions.
- The price note"11d. per pound" is elevenpence in pre-decimal British currency, included because Cassell's costed almost every recipe for the household budget.
Invalid cookery was a distinct branch of Victorian household work, and "teas" — beef tea, veal tea, chicken tea — were its staple: meat extracted in water with nothing to complicate digestion, no vegetables, no fat, no browning. Veal was favoured for the sick and for weaning because it was thought the blandest and most "delicate" of the meats, an idea with long roots. The confidence that such broths were nourishing owed a good deal to the mid-century enthusiasm for meat extracts associated with the chemist Justus von Liebig, though Florence Nightingale had already warned in Notes on Nursing (1859) that beef tea contained far less sustenance than nurses supposed. The arrowroot or sago stirred in here is a tacit admission of the same point. Cassell's was compiled for middle-class households managing their own sickrooms, and a clear, well-skimmed broth was treated as a test of basic competence at the stove.