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Scraped Beef Sandwiches
1/4 pound very lean steak, cut against the grain salt and pepper Plain or buttered bread or toast Remove all fat, scrape the pulp from the fibre, and season. Spread on thin slices of bread or toast, buttered or plain; cover with another slice and cut into small strips.
This is a raw beef sandwich, one of the standard invalid dishes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing in it is ever heated, and that is the problem.
- No cook step at any pointThe beef is scraped, seasoned and eaten. There is no stage at which any part of it reaches a temperature that would kill bacteria, and the bread contributes nothing.
- Scraping spreads surface contaminationPathogens on beef live on the cut surface, which is why a seared steak is safe rare. Scraping the pulp away from the fibre works surface material through the entire portion, the same hazard that makes raw ground beef riskier than a whole cut.
- E. coli O157:H7This organism was not identified until the 1980s and was unknown to the writer of this book. It needs only a very small dose to cause illness, and in children and the elderly it can lead to haemolytic uraemic syndrome and kidney failure. Those are precisely the people invalid cookery was aimed at.
- Salmonella and CampylobacterBoth can turn up on raw beef, at levels that cooking handles easily and seasoning does not. Salt and pepper have no antimicrobial effect at the quantities used here.
- "Very lean steak, cut against the grain"The instruction is about mechanics, not safety. Cutting across the grain shortens the fibres so the pulp separates cleanly under the back of a knife. It does nothing to the microbial load.
- Not comparable to steak tartareRestaurant tartare depends on a specific supply chain, whole muscle handled and trimmed to order under temperature control, and it still carries risk that some diners decline. A quarter pound of ordinary retail steak scraped at home is not the same proposition.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe from a source that addresses sourcing and handling, or make a cooked beef sandwich instead.
Scraped beef belonged to the sickroom rather than the tea table, and its appearance under sandwiches suggests how far invalid cookery had been absorbed into general household books. Nineteenth-century medical opinion widely held that raw or barely cooked red meat carried a concentrated "strength" that cooking drove off, and beef tea, beef juice pressed from a warmed steak, and scraped beef pulp were all prescribed for convalescents, anaemics and children who would not eat. Scraping with the edge or back of a knife separated the soft muscle pulp from the connective tissue, producing something a weak patient could swallow without chewing, which appears to have been the main point. The practice faded through the twentieth century, as germ theory reached domestic advice and as nutrition research established that cooked meat gives up its protein and iron perfectly well.