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Boiled Milk
Boil one ounce of shredded suet, a small piece of cinnamon, a grating of nutmeg, and one half pint of milk for five minutes. Remove the cinnamon, and when cool skim. Serve either hot or cold with crackers. This is beneficial for intestinal or consumptive troubles.
A sickroom drink of the fat-feeding school: beef suet melted into milk and spiced. It makes one small serving, and the technique matters more than the quantities.
- Half a pintOne cup of milk. The finished drink is a single dose, roughly a teacup, not a beverage for the table.
- SuetRaw beef kidney fat, sold shredded by butchers a century ago. Ask a butcher for fresh beef suet and grate or chop it fine yourself; the boxed "suet" sold for baking in Britain is often blended with flour or made from palm oil and will behave differently.
- The five minutesMilk with fat suspended in it will climb the pan the moment it moves. Use a heavy saucepan, keep it at a bare simmer, and stir; five minutes is enough to melt the suet and take up the spice.
- CinnamonA piece of stick cinnamon, not ground. Ground cinnamon cannot be removed as instructed and will leave the drink gritty.
- Skim when coolAs the milk cools the unemulsified fat sets in a pale cap on top, which is lifted off and discarded; what stays behind is milk enriched by whatever fat the liquid took up. Cooling first makes the fat easier to lift off cleanly than skimming hot.
- ServingReheat gently if serving hot, again without letting it boil over. The recipe says only 'crackers'; plain soda crackers or water biscuits would suit.
- The medical claimTreat the last sentence as period documentation. Boiled milk and suet does nothing for tuberculosis or intestinal disease, and the drink has no place in the care of anyone who is genuinely ill.
Nineteenth-century invalid cookery rested on the belief that wasting illness called for fat and concentrated nourishment, which is why suet, cream, beef tea and raw egg fill these chapters; "consumptive troubles" meant pulmonary tuberculosis, for which a rich diet and fresh air were the standard prescription before antibiotics. The other half of the tradition was alcohol: wine whey, milk punch, brandy and egg, dispensed as medicine rather than drink. "On the water wagon" was temperance slang of the period for having sworn off liquor, and a temperance cookery book had to supply a full sickroom repertoire without a drop of spirits in it; boiled milk with suet and spice is the kind of substitute that resulted.