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Beef Tea--No. 1
Take from 1 to 2 pounds of lean beef from the rump; cut off every particle of fat, and cut the meat into dice. Put it into a bottle and cork tightly. Tie down the cork, if necessary. Or it may be put in a fruit jar with a screw top and tightly sealed. Put the bottle in a deep saucepan with cold water enough to reach at least two-thirds to the top of the bottle; let it heat slowly, and boil twenty minutes or thirty. By this time the juice should be well extracted from the meat. Strain off the liquor and season with salt and pepper as required.
A sealed-bottle beef tea: the meat cooks in nothing but its own juice, so the result is concentrated and dark rather than pale like a water-based broth. One point of technique governs everything else.
- Do not seal the jar tightA rigid glass vessel closed hard and held at a boil for half an hour builds pressure and can crack or blow the lid. Set the screw band on loosely, or rest the lid on top unclamped, so steam can escape while the juices stay in.
- Protect the glassPut a folded cloth or a canning rack in the bottom of the saucepan so the bottle is not sitting on bare metal, and start it in cold water as written. A cold jar dropped into boiling water is what breaks.
- The cut"Lean beef from the rump" corresponds roughly to what a US market now sells as top or bottom round. A lean, well-worked muscle is the usual choice for this kind of extract; trimming the fat off completely is not fussiness, since fat is what makes beef tea greasy and cloying.
- Dice smallThe recipe says only "into dice"; smaller pieces expose more surface and give up their juice more readily than large chunks in the same twenty to thirty minutes. The meat is a means to an end here and will be spent and grey when you strain it.
- Boil means simmerKeep the surrounding water at a bare, rolling-lazy simmer rather than a hard boil. The contents of the bottle only ever reach about 200-212F either way, and violent boiling just rattles the glass.
- YieldThe yield is small, perhaps half a cup or so of liquid per pound of beef, though it will vary with the cut and the length of the boil. The recipe gives no direction to dilute it.
- FinishingStrain through a fine sieve and skim any fat that rises. Season at the end, as the recipe directs.
- KeepingThis is a plain meat extract with no acid, sugar or salt in preserving quantity. Refrigerate at once and use within a day, or freeze in small portions.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century literature of invalid cookery, the branch of household writing devoted to feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young. It was believed well into the twentieth century that the soluble juices of beef carried its "strength," and that a spoonful could nourish a patient who could not manage solid food -- a view helped along by the commercial meat extracts of the period and by nursing manuals that treated beef tea as standard sickroom equipment. Analysis eventually showed otherwise: the extract is mostly water, salts and flavour compounds, with very little protein, since the protein stays behind in the exhausted meat. The sealed-bottle method here dilutes the juice with no added water at all, and the "No. 1" of the title implies further versions following it. It survives today less as medicine than as a very concentrated beef essence, and as a reminder that soup stock and pharmacy once sat on the same shelf.