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Beef Tea En Casserole
1 lb. lean beef 1 pint (2 cups) water Salt Cut the beef into pieces, then shred it with a sharp knife, keeping back the fat and sinews; put the shredded meat into a casserole with a pinch of salt and the cold water; cover and allow it to stand in a cool place for two hours; then set it in the oven for two hours.
Remove the fat and serve hot.
A cold-water extraction finished in a low oven, from the invalid-cookery chapter. It is not a soup or a stock, and the technique depends entirely on keeping the liquid below a simmer.
- Never let it boilThe whole point of beef tea is a slow extraction that leaves the liquid clear and reddish-brown. Once it boils, the albumin coagulates into grey scum, the flavour turns flat and cooked, and you have a weak, cloudy broth instead.
- "Casserole" here means the potA lidded earthenware or fireproof vessel used on the stove or in the oven, not a baked dish. Any covered ovenproof pot of about a quart works; the lid matters more than the material, since the yield is small and evaporation will cost you.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number, only "set it in the oven." Use 250-275F and check that the liquid is steaming but not bubbling; if bubbles break the surface, prop the oven door or drop the heat.
- Shredding, not mincingScraping and shredding with a knife ruptures the muscle fibres without pressing them into a paste, so the juices leach out freely. A food processor or grinder compacts the meat and gives a muddier extract.
- The cold soakThe two-hour steep in cold water starts the extraction before any heat is applied. Do it in the refrigerator rather than in a "cool place" -- raw beef sitting in water at room temperature for two hours is the one part of this method that no longer stands.
- Finishing temperatureBecause it is a low-oven method, confirm the liquid reaches at least 160F before serving, and serve it hot rather than reheating it later.
- Strain and degreasePour through a fine sieve or muslin, then lift the fat from the surface -- easiest if you chill the liquid until the fat sets. The exhausted meat is left behind with almost no flavour.
- YieldA pound of beef and a pint (2 cups) of water gives somewhat less than the starting volume once the meat has taken up its share: about a single invalid's serving, taken in a cup rather than a bowl. Salt lightly, as the recipe does -- a pinch only.
Beef tea belonged to the sickroom rather than the dining room, and nearly every general cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried a section of "invalid recipes" in which it was the anchor dish. The theory was that the strength of meat lay in its juices, so gentle extraction without boiling was thought to deliver nourishment to patients who could not manage solid food -- a belief given commercial form in Liebig's Extract of Meat and, later, Bovril. Doubts were already current by the mid-nineteenth century: Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing remarked on beef tea's great restorative reputation alongside its very little nutritive power, and it is indeed mostly water, salts and flavour compounds rather than protein. Hospital dietetics moved away from it in the twentieth century. What survives is the method itself: a cold soak followed by a long, sub-simmer heat, which is still the way to draw clear, deeply beefy liquid out of meat.