Beef Tea
1 C cold water Cut beef up into small pieces or put through meat chopper. Put into fruit jar; add water and allow to stand 15 to 20 minutes to draw out the juice. Place on trivet or rack in pan of cold water; heat very slowly for about 2 hours. The water must not boil. Season, strain, cool and remove fat. Beef tea may be served hot or cold.
A sickroom staple built on very low, very long heat: the point is to extract the juices without cooking the meat into shreds, which is why the water is never allowed to boil.
- ProportionThe meat quantity is missing from the text as printed here. Beef tea recipes of this period commonly call for about 1 lb lean beef (round or shin, trimmed of fat and gristle) to 1 cup cold water, yielding roughly a cupful of finished tea.
- Start cold, alwaysCold water and a cold soak are not fussiness. Starting cold is held to draw the soluble proteins and salts out of the meat, while meat put straight into hot water coagulates at the surface and gives a weaker, greyer liquid.
- Hold the bath at 170-180F"Must not boil" is only half the instruction. Two hours held lukewarm is two hours in the bacterial danger zone. Keep the surrounding water at a steady 170-180F, hot enough to steam faintly but never to bubble, and check it with a thermometer rather than by eye.
- The fruit jarAny heatproof jar or a wide-mouthed canning jar works, set on a rack so it never touches the pan bottom. Leave the lid loose or resting on top only. A sealed jar in a hot bath builds pressure, and this is an extraction, not a canning process.
- StrainingPress the meat firmly against the strainer to get the last of the juice, then strain a second time through a fine sieve or muslin if you want it clear. The spent beef has given up most of its flavour and is normally discarded, though most of its protein remains in it.
- Fat and seasoningChilling makes the fat lift off in a solid disc, which is far easier than skimming warm. Season after straining, with salt only, and lightly, since it is often given to someone with little appetite.
- KeepingBeef tea has no acid, no sugar and no preservative. Refrigerate at once and use within two days, or freeze in small portions.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery" -- food for the sick, the convalescent and the very young, which most general cookbooks treated as a distinct department alongside sauces and puddings. The idea that the strength of meat lay in its expressed juice was given scientific cachet by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, whose meat extract was commercialised in the 1860s and sold worldwide; by the time this church book was compiled, the belief that a cup of beef tea could sustain a patient was widely held. Later nutritional analysis largely deflated the claim, since the extract is mostly water, salts and flavour compounds and appears to carry relatively little protein, but the technique survives in a different guise: the same principle of low, patient extraction underlies a good clear consomme. It appears here under "Sauces."