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Beef Juice
Buy one half pound from top of round; wipe, and set in oven five minutes; cut in thin slices, squeeze, using meat press or lemon squeezer. Serve in warm, not hot cups, with salt or not.
This is invalid cookery rather than cooking: the beef is barely warmed, then pressed for its juices, which are served as a drink. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that makes raw beef safe, and the intended drinker was usually a sick person.
- The meat is never cookedFive minutes in an oven warms the surface of a half-pound piece and little more. The pressed liquid is essentially raw beef serum, and the instruction to serve it in cups that are warm but "not hot" is consistent with an intention to avoid coagulating it, though the recipe itself gives no reason.
- Pathogen riskBeef carries E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Listeria, and the cut surfaces created when the slices are made and pressed are exactly where surface bacteria end up. Raw juice cannot be rendered safe by warming to blood heat, and O157:H7 has an infectious dose low enough that a small cupful is meaningful.
- Intended for the worst possible drinkerBeef juice was prescribed for invalids, convalescents, infants and the very old — the groups least able to survive a foodborne infection. Some nineteenth-century writers held that raw or barely warmed juice was more "nourishing" than cooked broth, which may account for the minimal heating here.
- Warm cups make it worseWarm cups are no safeguard -- A warmed cup does nothing to make a raw animal-protein liquid safe; it simply holds it at a temperature that favours any bacteria present rather than checking them.
- Nutritionally slight in any casePressed juice from half a pound of round yields only a few tablespoons, largely water, salts and myoglobin with relatively little protein. Such preparations had largely fallen out of use by the middle of the twentieth century.
- If you want the flavourUse a current recipe for beef broth or consommé, cooked through, rather than adapting this one.
Beef juice belongs to the large body of "invalid cookery" that occupied a chapter in many English and American household manuals of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside beef tea, barley water, koumiss and wine whey. The distinction the period tended to draw — though it was never cleanly observed, since essences were often made with gentle heat — was between beef tea, which was simmered, and beef juice or "beef essence," expressed cold or nearly cold in a screw press on the theory that heat destroyed some vital principle of the blood, a belief often attached, by popular transmission rather than documented doctrine, to Liebig's work on meat extracts, and to the same commercial impulse that produced Liebig's Extract of Meat and Bovril. Its appearance in a cookbook among chafing-dish recipes says something about how these volumes were assembled: the chafing dish was the fashionable apparatus of the 1890s and 1900s for cooking at the table or the bedside. Lemon squeezers and small meat presses were among the implements used for the purpose.