Important: Safety Warning
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Medicine (Put an ounce of isinglass)
Put an ounce of isinglass and half an ounce of cloves into a quart of water. Boil it down to a pint, strain it upon a pound of loaf sugar, and when cold add a little wine, when it will be fit for use. A very nourishing beverage may be made by merely boiling the isinglass with milk, and sweetening with lump sugar.
Wine Whey.
Boil a pint of milk, and put into it a glass of sherry or Madeira wine. Set it over the fire till it boils again; then put it aside till the curd has settled; then strain it, and sweeten to taste.
Beef-tea.
Cut a pound of lean beef into small pieces, pour over it a pint of cold water, and let it soak two hours; then boil it half an hour. Remove the scum that rises and all the fat or oil from the top. Pour off, and season with salt, but do not strain it. Beef-essence.
Put a pound of lean beef, cut into pieces, into a porter bottle, without water; cork it loosely, and place it in a pot of water, which should be made to boil around it for an hour. The essence of the meat will thus be drawn out in the liquid state.
Transparent Soup for Convalescents.
Cut the meat from a leg of veal into small pieces, and break the bone into several bits. Put the meat into a very large jug, and the bones at top, with a bunch of common sweet herbs, a quarter of an ounce of mace, and half a pound of Jordan almonds, finely blanched and beaten. Pour on it 4 quarts of boiling water, and let it stand all night covered, close by the fireside. The next day put it into a well-tinned saucepan, and let it boil slowly, till it is reduced to 2 quarts. Be careful, at the time it is boiling, to skim it, and take off the fat as it rises. Strain into a punch-bowl, and when settled for two hours pour it into a clean saucepan, clear from the sediments, if any. Add 3 ounces of rice or 2 ounces of vermicelli, previously boiled in a little water. When once more boiled, it will be fit for use.
Seidlitz Powders.
Take of Rochelle salts, 1 drachm; carbonate of soda, 25 grains; tartaric acid, 20 grains.
Dissolve the two first in a tumbler of water; then add the latter, and swallow without loss of time.
Six sickroom preparations gathered under one heading: a gelatin cordial, a whey, two beef extracts, an invalid soup and a dosed purgative. Two of them fail on modern safety grounds, and those are the ones to read first.
- The Seidlitz powders are a drug dose, not a drinkRochelle salts (potassium sodium tartrate) with sodium bicarbonate and tartaric acid is a saline purgative, measured here in apothecaries' drachms and grains. Compounding and swallowing a laxative dose from bulk chemicals at home is not cooking.
- The transparent soup stands overnight in the danger zoneFour quarts of veal broth held "close by the fireside" all night sits for hours between roughly 40F and 140F, which is precisely the range in which Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus multiply in cooked meat stock. The morning boil will not undo the toxins some of those organisms leave behind. A current stock recipe should be used instead.
- IsinglassNot a mineral: it is collagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in leaves or shreds and used as a setting agent and a clarifier for beer and wine. An ounce to a quart of water, boiled down by half, gives a strong jelly rather than a thin drink.
- Loaf and lump sugarBoth mean refined sugar broken from a cast cone or pressed block. A pound is a pound of ordinary granulated sugar today; the distinction was about purity and price, not flavour.
- The porter bottleA stout dark-glass bottle of roughly a pint to a quart. Standing any glass bottle in water brought to a rolling boil invites thermal shock, and the loose cork is the only thing preventing pressure buildup. The same beef essence is drawn out in a covered heatproof jar set in a gently simmering water bath.
- Jordan almondsLarge sweet almonds long associated with Malaga and prized as an eating grade; the sugar-shelled confectionery that now carries the name was originally made from them. Here they are blanched and pounded into the broth.
- Beef tea and beef essence yield very littleA pound of lean beef gives perhaps a cup of savoury liquid carrying gelatin, salt and flavour compounds but almost no protein. Victorian medicine credited these extracts with feeding the patient; they are best understood as a warm, palatable drink for someone who cannot face solid food.
- Wine wheyThe wine's acid and the second boil break the milk into curd and whey; strain through muslin. Some of the alcohol will be driven off in the boiling.
- A well-tinned saucepanNineteenth-century copper pans were lined with tin, and a worn lining let acidic liquids reach the copper. The warning is obsolete with stainless or enamelled ware, but it explains why the instruction is there at all.
Books of household receipts nearly always carried a section of "invalid cookery," and Mackenzie's is a fair sample of what a sick person in the 1820s and 1830s was given: gelatin, whey, meat extract and a clear soup, all thin, all warm, all easily swallowed. The faith in beef tea was near-universal and outlasted the century, reinforced by the mid-Victorian vogue for commercial meat extracts; the belief that the strength of the beef passed into the water was only slowly dismantled by nutritional chemistry, which found the extracts almost devoid of protein. Seidlitz powders take their name from Sedlitz in Bohemia, whose mineral spring water was famous as an aperient; the powders were sold as a portable imitation of it, the commercial version usually credited to the London house of Savory in the early nineteenth century, and they were still stocked in blue and white paper packets well into the twentieth. That a book of receipts should print the formula alongside a wine whey tells you how thin the line then was between the kitchen and the medicine chest.