Mead
INGREDIENTS. 1½ lb. of sugar, 1/2 pint of treacle, 1 oz. of essence of sassafras, 2 oz. of tartaric acid. AVERAGE Cost, 6d. per quart.
Pour on to the sugar and treacle 3 pints of boiling water and let it stand till lukewarm; add the tartaric acid and the sassafras, and when cold, bottle. When wanted, put a tablespoonful into a tumbler and fill two thirds full with cold water; stir in a very little soda and drink while foaming.
SEASONABLE in hot weather.
Meat. In studying several analyses of the same meat there will be seen different results, the reasons for which may be found in the age, the modes of feeding and the peculiarities of various animals. Again there is a great difference in the component parts of different joints of the same meat. There is a very perceptible difference between fat and lean meat; and the more fat the less water does it contain.
MEAT AND MACARONI. producers are wanted, then fatter meats are both more economical and useful. Very young meat, particularly that from animals that have been quickly forced to large growth, is very indigestible; and baked meat, even under the new and better system pursued in the construction of ovens, is thought less digestible than that either roasted, boiled, or stewed.
Again, meat twice cooked, or that which has been salted, is not so digestible or nutritive (with the exception however of bacon or ham) as fresh meat.
CONSTITUENTS OF 1 LB. OF VARIOUS KINDS OF MEAT. ... ...
Water Albumenoids Fat Mineral Matters ... ...
Water Albumenoids ...
Fat Mineral ...
BEEF. oz. grs. 8 0 2 184 ...
MUTTON. oz. grs. 7 16 2 0 ... ... 4 340 ... ... 0 350 ... 16 0 PORK. ...
LAMB. ... oz. grs. oz. grs. 8 44 1 323 1 6 69 263 ... ... 5 263 ... 8 0 ...
Matters 0244 ... 0 ... 16 195 0 6 176 0 245 16 0 VEAL. 10 0 2 281 OZ. grs. 0 312 ... 16 0
This is not fermented mead but a Victorian household cordial — a sweet acid syrup diluted at the moment of drinking and made to fizz with a pinch of soda. The flavouring is the problem, and it is not a problem that can be adjusted around.
- Essence of sassafras is the reason to stopThe flavour of sassafras root bark comes largely from safrole, which is hepatotoxic and was shown to cause liver tumours in rodents; it was banned as a food and beverage additive in the United States in 1960 and is restricted elsewhere. "Essence of sassafras" in Mrs Beeton's day was a safrole-bearing preparation of the oil, though its strength varied and a domestic cook had no way of gauging it.
- The quantity is far out of rangeOne ounce of essence in three pints of syrup, taken a tablespoon at a time, carries essential oil into every glass, and the drink is directed to be taken by the tumbler in hot weather. Modern safrole-free sassafras extracts exist for root beer, but they are a different product and this proportion of neat essence should not be reproduced with any concentrated oil.
- Tartaric acid at this strengthTwo ounces of tartaric acid in three pints is a substantial food acid load, intended to react with the soda in the glass, though each tumbler is heavily diluted and the soda neutralises part of it. If you want a fizzing cordial of this type, use a current recipe.
- "A very little soda"The soda is a carbonate of soda — bicarbonate in modern terms — added dry to the tumbler to react with the acid syrup and foam. The recipe gives no quantity at all, which is another reason it does not translate cleanly.
- On the archaic termsTreacle here is British black treacle or dark molasses, not golden syrup. "6d. per quart" is the average cost in pre-decimal pence, one of Mrs Beeton's standard editorial notes rather than an instruction.
- The text that followsEverything from "Meat. In studying several analyses..." onward belongs to the next entry in the book and has bled into this page, including the fragmentary table of meat constituents. It is not part of the mead.
By the nineteenth century the word mead had drifted a long way from honey wine: it is often said that temperance and household books used it for any sweet, spiced, home-bottled summer drink, and this one is essentially the syrup base of American root beer — treacle, sugar, acid and sassafras, activated with soda at the table. Sassafras (Sassafras albidum), a North American tree, reached British grocers as a cheap medicinal flavouring and was long sold both as a tonic "blood purifier" and as the defining taste of root beer and of saloop, a drink whose name originally belonged to an infusion of salep, with sassafras coming in later as a substitute, sold on London streets before coffee stalls displaced it. Recipes of this kind proliferated because they needed no fermentation, no ice and no skill, only a bottle and a corner of the pantry — the effervescence came from chemistry in the glass rather than from yeast. The safrole problem was not identified until the mid-twentieth century, by which time sassafras had been a staple household flavour for well over a hundred years.