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Scraped Beef
Scrape meat with sharp knife from lean beef cut from round until nothing but connective tissue is left. Form into small balls and broil slowly for about 2 minutes. Season and serve. For sandwiches do not cook but spread on thin slices of bread and season.
This belongs to the old invalid-cookery tradition of feeding raw or barely warmed beef to the sick, and that is exactly why it cannot be followed now. The problems are worth spelling out.
- The sandwich is raw beef, served to the vulnerableThe sandwich is raw beef -- The final sentence directs that the scraped meat not be cooked at all. Raw beef can carry E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Campylobacter, and anyone already weakened -- convalescents, small children, the elderly -- is among those most likely to suffer kidney failure or worse from an O157:H7 infection.
- Scraping increases the risk rather than reducing itSurface bacteria stay on the surface of an intact cut, which is why a seared steak is comparatively safe. Scraping distributes whatever was on the outside of the round throughout the mass, the same reason ground beef is treated more cautiously than a whole roast.
- Two minutes of slow broiling is not cookingThe cooked version fares no better. Small balls broiled slowly for about two minutes come nowhere near a safe internal temperature throughout, and the recipe gives no temperature, no thickness and no doneness cue to judge by.
- Assumptions that no longer holdModern beef travels further and is handled more than beef bought from a local butcher would have been, and the round in particular is often mechanically tenderised or blade-needled, which drives surface organisms into the interior.
- What the technique was forScraping with a knife blade separates muscle fibre from connective tissue, producing a soft pulp digestible without chewing. That purpose is real, but any beef prepared this way needs to be thoroughly cooked; consult a current recipe written with safe internal temperatures rather than this one.
- "Lean beef cut from round"The round is the hind leg — top round, bottom round or eye of round. The recipe specifies it lean, and the round is among the leaner cuts.
Invalid cookery was a standard chapter in American and British household books from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, and raw or nearly raw beef featured in it. Before intravenous nutrition and before much was understood about protein metabolism, concentrated beef — scraped pulp, beef tea, expressed "beef juice" squeezed from a warmed steak — was widely recommended as restorative for a weak patient, and heat was often said to destroy its virtue. Raw-beef preparations survive on restaurant menus as steak tartare, recorded in the early twentieth century, and carpaccio, credited to Harry's Bar in Venice around 1950; both are made from whole cuts trimmed and cut to order. What changed was not the food but the knowledge: E. coli O157:H7 was identified as a foodborne pathogen in 1982, and the outbreaks that followed ended the long assumption that fresh-looking beef was safe beef.