Beef-Tea, Baked
INGREDIENTS for 1 pint.-1 lb. of fleshy beef, 1 pint of water, 1/2 saltspoonful of salt. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Cut the beef into small square pieces, after trimming off all the fat, and put it into a baking-jar (these jars are sold expressly for the purpose of making soups, gravies, &c., in the oven, and are arranged with tightly-fitting lids) with the above proportion of water and salt; close the jar well, place it in a warm but not hot oven, and bake for 3 or 4 hours. When the oven is very fierce in the daytime, it is a good plan to put the jar in at night, and let it remain until next morning, when the tea will be done. It should be strained, and put by in a cool place until wanted.
It may also be flavoured with an onion, a clove, and a few sweet herbs, &c., when the stomach is sufficiently strong to take these.
TIME.-3 or 4 hours, or to be left in the oven all night.
Note. A good substitute for beef-tea may be made by using Liebig's Extract of Beef.
Beef tea is invalid cookery: a slow, gentle extraction rather than a stock, and the whole point is that it never boils. Treat the oven as a water-bath substitute and keep it low.
- "A warm but not hot oven"The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven a low setting, somewhere around 250-275F, answers the description. Hotter than that and the jar's contents will creep towards a simmer, and boiled beef tea goes cloudy and greasy instead of clear and savoury.
- The baking-jarA lidded jar sold expressly for oven cookery, with a close-fitting lid; the recipe does not say what it was made of. A small lidded casserole, a heavy crock, or a wide-mouth canning jar with the ring loosely on all work; the seal only needs to stop evaporation, not to be airtight. Stand it in a roasting tin with an inch of water for extra insurance against scorching.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is an eighth of a teaspoon for a pint. Deliberately under-salted for a sickroom; season at the end for ordinary eating.
- The meat"Fleshy beef" means lean, well-worked muscle: shin, skirt, or the leanest chuck. Trim every scrap of fat, since fat is what makes beef tea unpalatable to an invalid. Cut the pieces small, about half an inch, to increase the extracting surface.
- Skip the overnight versionLeaving the jar in a range oven as it dies down means hours of meat sitting inside the danger zone, roughly 40-140F, where bacteria multiply freely. Modern ovens hold a steady low temperature perfectly well; use the 3-4 hour bake and ignore the all-night method.
- Yield and keepingA pint of water and a pound of beef gives rather less than a pint after straining. Strain, chill fast, lift off any set fat, and refrigerate; use within two days or freeze.
- Liebig's ExtractThe commercial meat extract marketed from the 1860s. Modern beef extracts and bouillon concentrates are the nearest equivalent; a spoonful in hot water stands in for the "good substitute" of the note.
- What it actually isBeef tea carries flavour, gelatin, salts and very little protein, whatever the Victorians believed. It is a pleasant clear broth, not nourishment for someone who cannot eat.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century category of invalid cookery, which occupied whole chapters of household manuals because feeding the sick at home was a domestic duty rather than a hospital one. The dish rests on a widely held Victorian conviction, generally traced to the chemist Justus von Liebig, that the flavourful soluble matter drawn out of meat carried its nourishing virtue; Liebig's Extract of Meat, manufactured from South American cattle from the 1860s, was marketed on exactly that promise, and Mrs Beeton's closing note shows how quickly the commercial product was accepted as an equivalent. The belief was contested even at the time, notably by Florence Nightingale, who observed in Notes on Nursing that beef tea contained little real sustenance, and later analysis proved her right. The baked version here exists for a practical reason: a coal range was always hot somewhere, and a sealed jar tucked into the falling heat of the oven cost nothing in fuel or attention, unlike a saucepan that had to be watched to keep it from boiling.