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Beef Tea in Chafing-dish
Cut juicy round steak into pieces about two inches square. Heat the blazer very hot; heat also a wooden lemon-squeezer in hot water or in any way that is most convenient. Put the meat
A piece of Victorian invalid cookery rather than cooking proper: squares of steak are scorched on the hot pan and then crushed in a heated press so the juices run out to be drunk. The vessels and terms need translating, but the method itself puts it outside what a modern kitchen should attempt.
- The blazerIn chafing-dish work the blazer is the upper pan that sits directly over the flame; the hot-water pan beneath it is used for gentle work. Here the blazer is used bare and very hot, essentially as a small skillet.
- The wooden lemon-squeezerThis is the old two-part hinged wooden press, not a reamer or a modern citrus juicer. The recipe does not say why it is warmed, though presumably so the extracted juice would not be chilled on contact. Wooden presses of that pattern also absorb meat juices and cannot be sanitised.
- Why this is unsafeThe point of the technique is to keep the interior of the meat raw so that the juice runs freely. Only the outer surface ever reaches heat; the liquid drunk is essentially raw beef serum, and it carries the ordinary risks of raw ground or crushed beef, including E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella. Crushing spreads any surface contamination through the whole yield.
- Who it was made forBeef tea was fed to the sick, the elderly and small children, which is precisely the group least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. That makes the dish worse rather than better as written.
- Nutritional claimExpressed meat juice is mostly water, salts and a little soluble protein. It has almost no food value, so there is nothing here worth reconstructing; a current recipe for beef or bone broth, simmered properly, gives more nourishment and no risk.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of invalid cookery, in which the sickroom had its own small repertoire distinct from the family table. It was believed that the strength of meat lay in its juices and that a patient too weak to digest solid food could absorb that strength directly, an idea encouraged by the commercial meat extracts and beef essences that flooded the market after mid-century. Chafing-dish books like this one carried the recipe because the chafing dish was a bedside and parlour appliance as much as a party one: a nurse or a hostess could work it without a kitchen fire. Later analysis found beef tea to be nearly devoid of protein, and by the early twentieth century physicians were already describing it as a stimulant and a comfort rather than a food.