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Water, Making of Tea, Coffee, Etc: Beef
BEEF TEA The stimulating principle that we have noted in tea, coffee and chocolate, is duplicated in meats by a similar principle. This it is that gives color and flavor to the juices of meat. This principle in meats, as also the albuminous juices and minor compounds, are soluble in water, and when extracted make a valuable beverage in that it stimulates the appetite. Also being easily digested such a beverage is often desirable, when one is tired or indisposed. The pleasing aroma incidental to cooked meats can not be secured by means of cold water, but the albuminous juices (proteid) begin to harden or coagulate at about 134 deg F. The aroma is an essential aid to digestion and the hardening of the juices a hindrance; thus the temperature of the water should be regulated to fit both requirements, that is, the preservation of juices and flavor.
RECIPE FOR BEEF TEA One pound of beefsteak from the round, two cups of cold water, salt to season. Remove fat from the meat, wipe the steak with a damp cloth, then cut into small pieces. Have ready a fruit jar, scalded and cooled; put in the meat and two cups of cold water, cover the jar and let it stand twenty minutes in a cool place. Fold a newspaper to make a thick, smooth mat; put this into a saucepan, set the jar upon it and pour in cold water to surround the jar to the height of the liquid inside. Let the water heat gradually to 130 deg F. Keep it at this point for two hours, then increase the temperature to about 134 deg F., or until the color of the juice is darkened a little and the albuminous juices are slightly coagulated. Pour off the liquid, season and serve. A sprig or two of parsley, or a stalk of celery cut in pieces, may be put into the jar with the meat.
QUESTIONS 1. Think of two ways by which you can distinguish between boiling and simmering water. 2. Why is water heated more quickly when the saucepan is covered? 3. If you wish to make a thick syrup of sugar and water, should the pan be covered or uncovered, and why? 4. What difference do you note in the construction of an ordinary coffee and a teapot? Give reason for same. 5. Which is preferable, the first or last cup of tea, of coffee, and why? 6. Criticise the following menu for a dinner for a family of two young people: Broiled bluefish; backed potatoes; boiled onions, buttered; lettuce, French dressing; bread and butter; Boston cream cakes, cocoa.
This is an invalid's drink built on holding raw beef in warm water for two hours and then drinking the liquid unheated. The temperatures named in the original are below any pasteurizing range, and the drink was intended for exactly the people least able to tolerate a foodborne illness.
- The temperature is the whole problemThe recipe calls for two hours at 130 deg F, then a rise to about 134 deg F. That sits at the very bottom edge of any range in which beef can be pasteurized, and only under closely controlled and measured conditions, which this method does not provide. The beef is never cooked afterward, and the extracted liquid is served as it comes off the meat.
- The slow climb through the danger zoneThe jar starts cold and stands twenty minutes in a cool place, then warms gradually in a water bath. That is a long, unmeasured passage through the temperatures at which bacteria multiply fastest, with a large surface area of cut raw beef to multiply on.
- Cut surfaces, not a whole steakA seared whole muscle is a different case from beef diced small. Cutting distributes any surface contamination throughout the meat and through the liquid, and the liquid is the part that is drunk.
- Coagulation is not sterilizationThe author's cue "the albuminous juices are slightly coagulated" is a visual marker for protein denaturation beginning around 134 deg F. It says nothing about pathogen reduction, which depends on temperature held over measured time and cannot be judged by color.
- Who it was made forBeef tea was fed to the sick, the elderly, the post-operative and small children. Those are the groups for whom an undercooked-meat infusion carries the highest consequence. Beef tea left invalid cookery largely because its nutritive value was disproved; its safety is a further reason not to revive this version as written.
- Thermometers of the periodEven setting the biology aside, the recipe assumes a household thermometer accurate to a few degrees in a jar sitting on a folded newspaper in a saucepan. The margin the author is working in is four degrees wide, and the method cannot hold it.
- If you want the flavorA properly simmered beef broth or consommé delivers the same savory extract with none of this risk. Use a current recipe rather than adapting the temperatures here.
Beef tea belonged to the great nineteenth-century apparatus of invalid cookery, when broths, gruels, jellies and panadas were the standard nursing diet and a cook was expected to know several. Its scientific prestige owed much to Justus von Liebig, whose meat extract, marketed from the 1860s, was widely believed to concentrate the nourishing essence of beef; the chemistry of the day treated the "stimulating principle" described in this passage as genuinely restorative. Florence Nightingale registered the doubt, observing in her Notes on Nursing that beef tea contained very little actual nutriment, though she still held it to be of practical use to patients; later analysis bore out her point about nutriment: what dissolves at these temperatures is chiefly water-soluble salts and flavor compounds, not meaningful protein. That this recipe sits in a school text alongside questions about teapot spouts and menu criticism shows how domestic science of the period taught cooking as applied chemistry, with the thermometer as the instrument of proof.