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Beef Tea
1 pound lean beef 1 cup cold water Cut beef up into small pieces or put through meat chopper. Put into fruit jar; add cold water and allow to stand 15 to 20 minutes to draw out the juice. Place on trivet or rack in pan of cold water and allow to heat very slowly for about 2 hours. The water must not boil. Season, strain, cool and remove fat. Beef tea may be served either hot or chilled.
A water-bath extraction rather than a stock: the whole point is that the liquid never boils, so the meat proteins do not coagulate and lock up the juice. Everything else follows from that.
- Never let it boilIf the surrounding water reaches a rolling boil the beef seizes, goes grey and sheds a scum of coagulated albumen, and the yield drops sharply. Hold the outer water at a bare shiver. The recipe itself names no temperature; if you work with a thermometer, bear in mind that albumen starts to set from about 150F, though holding the jar in the 150-160F range for the full two hours has the advantage of being well past the point at which pathogens are destroyed at that duration.
- Do not seal the jar"Fruit jar" means an ordinary Mason-type canning jar, used here only as a heatproof vessel. Rest the lid on loosely or leave it off; a sealed jar in a hot water bath builds pressure. Set it on a trivet or folded cloth so the glass never touches the hot pan bottom.
- The cold soak mattersThe 15 to 20 minutes in cold water is not idle time. Cold water draws out soluble proteins and salts that hot water would set; starting from cold and rising slowly is the whole mechanism.
- Cut of beefLean means lean — shin, skirt or a trimmed piece of round. Fat contributes nothing but the layer you will scrape off later, and marbled cuts are wasted here.
- Chop fineA meat grinder gives far more surface area than knife-cut cubes, which should mean more extract in the same two hours; the recipe offers exactly this choice.
- YieldA pound of beef and a cup of water gives only a small cupful of dark, intensely savoury liquid — one invalid's serving, not a soup course.
- Skimming and storageChill fully before lifting the fat; it comes away as a solid disc. Because it is barely cooked and lightly salted, treat it as highly perishable — refrigerate at once and use within a day, especially if it is going to someone who is ill.
- SeasoningSalt only, and lightly. Nineteenth-century sickroom cookery avoided pepper and aromatics on the theory that they irritated a weak stomach, and the recipe assumes that restraint.
Beef tea belongs to a whole genre of nineteenth-century "invalid cookery," the chapter every general household manual carried for feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very old. The underlying belief was that the strength of meat lay in its expressible juice rather than its fibre, an idea given enormous commercial momentum by the mid-century vogue for concentrated meat extracts, and cooks were taught to coax that juice out at low heat rather than boil it away. Analysts eventually showed that beef tea is mostly water, salts and flavour compounds with very little actual protein — nourishing in the way a warm drink is nourishing, not in the way a meal is — and by the mid-twentieth century it had largely retreated from medical advice into the domain of comfort. That it appears here at all suggests how routine the invalid chapter still was in kitchen books of the period.