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Frozen Beef Tea
Prepare beef tea, pour into glass, surrounded with ice and salt, and freeze, turning often.
Two lines of instruction that assume you already know how to make beef tea and how to freeze without a machine. Both assumptions need filling in.
- What beef tea isNot stock. It is about a pound of lean beef, finely chopped or scraped, steeped in a pint of cold water and then heated gently and strained, producing a thin, meaty, faintly salted liquid rather than a gelatinous broth. It is closer in body to consomme than to anything you would call soup.
- Bring it properly hotNineteenth-century invalid cookery usually insisted beef tea be kept below boiling, sometimes barely more than warm, to avoid coagulating the albumen, which leaves it well short of a safe temperature. Since this version is then chilled and eaten cold, bring the tea to a full simmer and hold it there before straining and freezing.
- The freezing mixtureA glass set in a bowl of crushed ice layered with coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part rock salt by volume, will drop well below 32F and freeze the contents through. Pack the mixture up the outside of the glass to the level of the liquid.
- "Turning often" is the hingeRotating the glass drags the frozen layer off the wall so it does not set as a solid block. Scraping down the sides every few minutes with a spoon gives the loose, granular texture the dish is after, closer to a savoury granita than to a sorbet.
- Salt slows the setIf the tea is seasoned, dissolved salt lowers its freezing point slightly, which together with constant turning tends toward a soft, granular set rather than a solid block.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve in the glass it froze in, with a spoon, immediately, since it slumps quickly at room temperature.
Beef tea was the standard sickroom food of the English-speaking nineteenth century, prescribed for fevers, convalescence and general debility on the belief that the strength of the meat passed into the water; later analysis showed it carried very little protein and mostly stimulated the appetite through flavour and salt. Freezing it was a refinement for patients who could not face anything warm, a trick that appears repeatedly in invalid cookery alongside frozen milk, iced albumen water and wine jellies. The recipe comes from a cookbook issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which like many food firms of the era published a general household volume that ranged well beyond its own product. The ice-and-salt freezing bath it takes for granted is described without explanation, suggesting the technique was familiar enough to its readers to need none.