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Beef Extract (Nourishing)
Cut round steak into small pieces. Put in sterile canning jar, cover, and place jar in kettle of cold water. Heat water gradually and keep at temperature of 130° F. for 2 hours. Turn meat from jar and press to extract juice; season with salt.
Eggs à la Goldenrod 1/2 cup hot milk 1/2 tbsp. flour 1/2 tbsp. butter 1/4 tsp. salt Make a sauce of first ingredients. Finely chop white of 1 hard-cooked egg 1 slice toast 6 toast points parsley egg and reheat in sauce. Remove crusts from bread, cut in two lengthwise, and toast until delicately browned. Arrange on a serving dish, pour over sauce. Cover sauce with yolk of egg forced through a strainer and garnish with toast points and parsley.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a sick-room beef extract and Eggs à la Goldenrod. The first cannot be recommended; the notes below explain why, and then deal with the egg dish.
- The beef extract never reaches a safe temperatureThe instruction is to hold the jar at 130°F for two hours. That is at the very bottom edge of the range in which beef can be pasteurised at all, it depends on the meat itself reaching and holding that temperature throughout, and the recipe gives no way to verify the temperature of the meat rather than of the water around it. What is served is essentially barely warmed beef juice.
- Chopped meat is the specific problemWhole-muscle beef carries most of its bacterial load on the outside. Cutting round steak into small pieces distributes surface contamination, including possible E. coli O157:H7, throughout the mass, so any surviving organisms end up in the pressed juice.
- The intended eater is the wrong eaterBeef extract of this kind was made for invalids, convalescents and children — precisely the people least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. If a nourishing broth is wanted for someone unwell, use a current recipe for a properly simmered stock.
- "Sterile canning jar" is not a safeguardSterilising the jar addresses the container, not the meat. Invalid cookery of the period often favoured low heat on the theory that it preserved the meat's juices; that does not make the product safe.
- Eggs à la Goldenrod: the sauceHalf a cup of milk to half a tablespoon each of flour and butter gives a thin pouring sauce, not a thick one. Cook the roux a minute before adding the hot milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and season at the end.
- Toast pointsSix toast points plus one whole slice means more bread than the method accounts for: the recipe only tells you to remove crusts and cut one slice in two lengthwise for the base, so the points must come from further bread. Cut the points before toasting, not after.
- The yolkPushing the hard-cooked yolk through a fine sieve is what gives the dish its name — the scattered yellow crumb is meant to look like goldenrod in flower. Use a yolk that is fully set and dry, as a soft one clogs the mesh.
- YieldAs written the egg dish serves one. Multiply straightforwardly for a breakfast table.
Beef tea, beef juice and "extract of beef" were staples of invalid cookery from the mid-1800s onward, when it was widely held that the soluble matter pressed from raw or barely warmed meat carried the animal's strength in concentrated form. The idea is generally traced to Justus von Liebig, whose commercial meat extract was sold from the 1860s and whose name lent scientific weight to the practice; household cookbooks then produced many homemade versions, of which this warm-jar method is one of the gentlest. By the time this book was compiled the nutritional claim had already been undermined — the pressed juice is mostly water, salts and flavour compounds, with very little protein — but the recipes persisted in the sick-room chapters common in community cookbooks of the period. Philathea cookbooks were fundraisers produced by Philathea classes, the women's Bible-study groups of the Baraca-Philathea movement.