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Raw Beef Sandwiches
Cut bread in thin slices; remove crusts; shape and spread with raw beef. Serve as soon as made.
To scrape Raw Beef Buy bottom or top of round of beef; wipe, then scrape with a teaspoon; there should be nothing but fiber left when all meat is scraped.
This is raw beef with no cooking step at any point, and the specific technique it calls for makes the risk worse rather than better. The notes below explain the problem; a current recipe should be consulted for anything involving raw or lightly cooked beef.
- No kill step at allNothing here is heated. Beef surfaces pick up bacteria during slaughter and butchery, and the only reliable remedy is heat — 160F throughout for any beef that has been cut, scraped or ground.
- Scraping spreads surface contamination inwardWhole intact muscle carries most of its bacterial load on the outside. Scraping a face of round with a spoon drags that surface into the loose pulp you then spread on bread, so the pathogens are distributed through the whole portion rather than confined where searing would reach them.
- The organism the period did not know aboutEscherichia coli O157:H7 was not identified until the 1980s. It has a very low infectious dose and can cause haemolytic uraemic syndrome, particularly in children and older adults — exactly the people to whom scraped beef was traditionally fed.
- "Serve as soon as made" is not a safeguardSpeed limits further bacterial growth but does nothing about what is already present. The instruction most likely has to do with the pulp turning grey and weeping rather than with pathogens, though the book gives no reason.
- Round of beefTop and bottom round are the lean cuts from the hind leg; they are dense and lean and scrape cleanly with almost no fat or gristle. The recipe's test — nothing but fibre left when all the meat is scraped — is a description of connective tissue, not a doneness cue.
- Steak tartare is not the same thingRestaurant tartare relies on a documented supply chain, whole intact muscle trimmed and cut to order, temperature control throughout, and in some jurisdictions specific licensing. None of that is implied by "buy bottom or top of round" at a 1907 butcher's counter, and it is not reproduced by a home kitchen and a teaspoon.
Scraped raw beef was a standard item of Anglo-American invalid cookery from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth, appearing in nursing manuals and household books beside beef tea, beef juice and raw beef essence. The reasoning was pre-bacteriological: raw meat was thought to retain a vitality or nourishment that cooking destroyed, and scraping produced a pulp that required no chewing and little digestive effort, which made it a favoured food for convalescents, teething children and the tubercular. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a general household cookbook, and the appearance of this entry as an ordinary sandwich filling — with no comment or caveat at all — suggests how far the practice had been absorbed into everyday domestic cooking. Its disappearance from cookbooks over the following decades broadly tracks the spread of germ theory, meat inspection legislation and, much later, the identification of the specific pathogens that make the dish indefensible.