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Beef Pats
Scrape clean, uncooked beef until you have the desired quantity of paste; make it into tiny pats; put each pat on a square of bread; toast quickly in a hot oven and serve with a little salt and butter. 1 cup cold chicken 1 cup water
This is invalid cookery — food meant for the sick — and it belongs to a tradition that deliberately kept beef barely cooked. The method cannot be brought into a modern kitchen as written.
- Scraped beef is raw minceScraping with a spoon or dull knife against the grain lifts the muscle pulp and leaves the connective tissue behind, producing a soft paste. Mechanically it is identical to grinding: any bacteria on the cut surface are distributed all the way through the paste, so the interior can no longer be treated as sterile the way an intact steak's interior can.
- The heat never reaches the meat"Toast quickly in a hot oven" is a browning instruction; the book gives no temperature, and however hot the oven, the minute or two needed to brown bread is nowhere near long enough to carry a pat of raw beef pulp through to a safe internal temperature. The recipe's whole intent is that the beef stay red and soft, which is precisely the condition under which E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella survive in comminuted beef.
- The intended eater is the worst candidateDishes like this were fed to convalescents, infants and the elderly — the groups least able to withstand a foodborne infection. That is the specific reason this one is worth flagging rather than shrugging at.
- The stray line at the end"1 cup cold chicken 1 cup water" has nothing to do with beef pats; it appears to be an ingredient line stranded from a neighbouring recipe.
- If you want the dishA current recipe using cooked beef, or a properly handled steak tartare from a butcher who supplies meat for that purpose, is the sensible route. Nothing here should be adapted.
Scraped beef belongs to the nineteenth-century sickroom, where raw or nearly raw meat was prescribed as a restorative for anaemia, consumption and the long convalescences that followed typhoid and childbirth. Beef tea, beef juice pressed from a warmed steak, and scraped beef pulp all rested on the same belief — that the strengthening virtue of meat lay in its juices and was destroyed by cooking. Scraping rather than mincing was the preferred technique because it separated the soft muscle from the gristle without a grinder, giving a paste an invalid could swallow with little effort. Public-health work on meat-borne infection gradually pushed such preparations out of mainstream household manuals, though the decline was slow, and raw scraped beef lingered in nursery feeding advice considerably longer than the evidence warranted.