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Bouillon and Tomato Catsup
Mix one teaspoonful of beef extract with one tablespoonful of tomato catsup. Add hot water, and season with salt and a little white pepper. Rice Water No. 1 Wash three tablespoonfuls of rice. Soak in five cups of cold water for one half hour, and then boil for an hour. Strain through a fine sieve, and serve hot with either salt or sugar.
Rice Water No. 2 Wash two tablespoonfuls of rice and boil in two cups of cold water for about an hour. Add a small piece of cinnamon. Strain and serve with milk or cream. Season with salt.
Three sickroom drinks, given in the compressed style of invalid cookery, where the assumption is that a nurse is making a single cupful at a time. The quantities are small and the method forgiving; the main gaps are the ones the original leaves unstated.
- Beef extractThis means the thick, dark, salty paste sold as Liebig's Extract of Meat, Bovril or Armour's — not canned broth and not a bouillon cube dissolved in advance. A modern yeast-and-beef paste behaves the same way; a cube will work but is saltier per teaspoon, so hold back the added salt until you have tasted.
- How much hot waterThe recipe does not say. One cup (8 oz) of water to the teaspoon of extract and tablespoon of catsup gives a drink of about the strength of consommé. Less water makes it aggressively salty.
- Tomato catsup, then and nowHome and small-batch catsups of the period were often thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than today's, though sweetened commercial ketchup was already widely sold by this date. Modern ketchup may make the bouillon noticeably sugary; a tomato passata with a splash of vinegar is closer to the thinner, sharper style.
- Rice water proportionsNo. 1 is the thinner of the two: three tablespoons of rice to five cups of water, reduced over an hour. No. 2, at two tablespoons to two cups, is roughly half again as concentrated and comes out faintly creamy. Both will need topping up as they boil; keep the pan lidded and at a bare simmer or you will scorch the starch at the bottom.
- StrainingA fine sieve is enough for a cloudy, nourishing liquid. For the clear, almost silky rice water that was the point of the exercise, line the sieve with muslin and let it drip rather than pressing the grains through.
- The cinnamon in No. 2A small piece presumably means a fragment of stick cinnamon, perhaps an inch. The recipe does not say when to add it; late in the boiling keeps the flavour fresher. Ground cinnamon will cloud the drink and settle as grit.
- YieldNo. 1 gives roughly two to three cups after reduction and straining; No. 2 about one cup. Both are meant to be drunk the day they are made — starchy liquids sour quickly and were never intended to be kept.
- Don't waste the riceThe strained grains are perfectly edible, if bland, and could be turned into a pudding rather than thrown out.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in nearly every household manual of the period, and its own logic: the sick were assumed to want liquids, and beef tea was believed to carry the strength of meat in drinkable form — a belief that outlasted the nutritional science that eventually disproved it, since meat extract is mostly salt, gelatin and flavour compounds rather than protein. Rice water was the standard bland drink for digestive upset, and something much like it is still sometimes suggested today for rehydration; the tomato catsup here may well be doing the job that a spoonful of sherry or a little wine would have done in an earlier book: adding acid and interest to an otherwise flat cup. A book titled for Uncle Sam's water wagon is a temperance collection, gathering drinks that could be handed to a patient or a guest without recourse to the spirits that the standard sickroom repertoire — brandy toddies, wine whey, egg nog — took entirely for granted.