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Beef Juice
1/2 lb. top round of beef few grains salt Cube meat, add salt and heat over low flame for five minutes, then press all the liquid from it with a meat press or an old fashioned wooden lemon squeezer. Serve in a warm cup, add salt to taste. This must be prepared fresh for each serving. Serves 1 cup.
This is expressed raw beef serum, warmed but never cooked, and it was intended for exactly the people least able to survive a foodborne infection. It cannot be recommended today in any form.
- The meat never reaches a safe temperatureFive minutes over a low flame on cubed beef warms the surface and no more; the interior, which is where the pressed juice comes from, stays raw. Nothing in the method brings any part of the meat to the 160F/71C that would make ground or cut-surface beef safe.
- The specific pathogensRaw beef juice can carry E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria. O157:H7 has an infectious dose measured in tens of organisms, and cutting the meat into cubes spreads any surface contamination onto every face that will later be squeezed.
- The intended drinker is the worst possible oneInvalid cookery meant food for the sick, the convalescent, the elderly and often infants. Those are precisely the groups in whom an O157:H7 infection is most likely to progress to hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure. A current recipe from a reliable source should be used for anyone who is ill.
- "Prepared fresh for each serving" is not a safeguardThe instruction may reflect how quickly the liquid spoils, but freshness does not remove pathogens that were on the meat when it was bought. There is no step in this method that kills anything.
- EquipmentThe meat press and the wooden lemon squeezer named here are both obsolete household tools. A wooden squeezer in particular cannot be cleaned to modern standards once raw beef serum has soaked into it.
- On the yield line"Serves 1 cup" appears to mean one portion rather than a literal cup of liquid; half a pound of round yields well under a cup in practice, closer to two or three tablespoons.
- What it was thought to doThe nourishment claimed for beef juice does not hold up well. Pressed serum is largely water, salts and flavour compounds, with only a small amount of protein and little food value.