Beef-Tea Custard
INGREDIENTS for large breakfastcupful. pint of beef-tea made by one of the preceding recipes, the yolks of two eggs, the white of one, salt.
AVERAGE COST, 6d.
for large breakfastcupful.—1/2 pint of beef-tea Beat the eggs and mix them well with the beef-tea, adding salt to taste, butter a basin, put in the mixture, tie a buttered paper over and steam for 20 minutes. The water should bubble after the custard is in.
This can be eaten either hot or cold; or, cut in small pieces, it can be put in hot beef-tea. It is a nice and nourishing food for invalids.
TIME.-20 minutes to steam the custard.
Beef-Tea, Quickly Made-INGREDIENTS for 1 pint.-1 lb. of lean beef, 1 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
With a sharp knife scrape the beef into BEEF-TEA, SUBSTITUTE FOR. fibres; this should be done on a board, Put the scraped meat into a china cup or basin, and add the water lukewarm. Let it stand for 20 minutes, then put the whole into a lined saucepan, and let it cook long enough to colour it, but no more, 5 minutes is quite sufficient. TIME. In all about an hour.
Beef-Tea, Savoury. (SOYER'S Recipe.) INGREDIENTS for 1 pint.-1 lb. of solid beef, 1 oz. of butter, 1 clove, 2 button onions or 1/2 a large one, 1 saltspoonful of salt, 1 quart of water. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Cut the beef into very small dice; put it into a stewpan with the butter, clove, onion, and salt; stir the meat round over the fire for a few minutes until it produces a thin gravy, then add the water, and let it simmer gently from to of an hour, BEEF-TEA TRAY. skimming off every particle of fat. When done, strain it through a sieve, and put it by in a cool place until required. The same, if wanted quite plain, is done by merely omitting the vegetables, salt, and clove; the butter cannot be objectionable, as it is taken out in skimming.
TIME. to hour.
Note. The meat left from beef-tea may be boiled a little longer, and pounded with spices, &c., for potting. It makes a very nice breakfast dish.
Three linked entries: a savoury custard set with beef broth, and two ways of making the broth itself. One of those broths is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe "Quickly Made" beef-tea directs you to scrape raw beef into fibres, steep it in lukewarm water for 20 minutes, then heat it only "long enough to colour it, but no more, 5 minutes is quite sufficient." The meat and its juices are never brought to a safe temperature, and the infusion stands lukewarm — in the range where E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella multiply — before that brief heating. It was intended for invalids, precisely the people least able to survive an infection. Use a current stock or broth recipe for the liquid.
- The Soyer version is a different matterThat one simmers a pound of diced beef in a quart of water (the timing is given only as a fraction of an hour, garbled in this text), which is ordinary broth-making. It is the quick lukewarm-infusion method, not beef-tea as a category, that fails.
- Imperial pintBeeton's pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2.5 US cups, not 16. Assume American measure and you will be roughly a fifth short of the liquid the recipe intends.
- "Large breakfastcupful"A breakfast cup is roughly 8-10 fl oz, larger than a teacup and smaller than a modern mug. The custard is a single generous portion.
- SaltspoonfulAbout a quarter teaspoon, the smallest of the spoon measures in ordinary use; teaspoon, dessertspoon and tablespoon are the larger ones.
- "Lined saucepan"Usually copper lined with tin, though enamelled ware served the same purpose. The instruction exists because acidic or salty liquids attack bare copper. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- The buttered paperNot decoration. Tied over the basin it keeps condensate off the surface of the custard, which would otherwise weep and pit. Foil or a pleated parchment cover does the same.
- Egg ratioTwo yolks and one white to a pint gives a soft set that slices only just — hence the direction to cut it in small pieces and drop them into more broth. It is a royale, not a firm baked custard.
- The cost lineSixpence, eightpence and ninepence are the book's own costings for the three recipes on this page; the edition, and so the exact date of the prices, is not given here.
Beef tea was the central preparation of Victorian invalid cookery — an entire genre of recipe writing aimed at people who could not eat solid food, in an era before intravenous fluids and when typhoid, consumption and long convalescences kept households nursing for months. It was believed to carry the essential nourishment of meat in a form the sick could absorb, a conviction that survived well past the point at which chemists had shown that most of the protein stays behind in the fibres. The savoury version is credited to Alexis Soyer, chef of the Reform Club, who reorganised the cooking at the British army hospitals in the Crimea and wrote extensively on feeding the sick and the poor; his recipes circulated in domestic manuals for decades after his death in 1858. The closing note on potting the spent meat is pure Victorian thrift.