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Seventh Day: Beef
No. 91.-BEEF AND SAGO BROTH.
Two lbs. beef cut up small into two quarts cold, unsalted water; stew until the beef falls to pieces; strain it out, add salt and one cup sago, carefully washed and soaked until soft in a little lukewarm water. After the sago is in, simmer one hour, stirring often. Then add the beaten yolks of three eggs; boil up once and serve with dry toast.
No. 92-BEEF STEAK TEA.
Broil one lb. of tender, juicy beef for ten minutes; season with salt and pepper; cut it into small pieces, pour on a pint of boiling water, steep it half an hour, then press well, and pour off the liquid.
No. 93-BEEF SANDWICH.
Three numbered entries, though the third breaks off after its title — the beef sandwich never arrives. What remains are two invalid-cookery standards: a thickened broth and a beef tea.
- Sago, and what to useSago is starch from the sago palm, sold in small pearls in Asian and South Asian groceries; pearl tapioca behaves almost identically. One cup of dry pearls into two quarts of broth gives a very thick, almost porridge-like result — half a cup is closer to modern taste for a broth.
- The soaking mattersUnsoaked sago pearls will stay chalky in the centre and shed starch into the liquid unevenly. Soak in lukewarm water 30 minutes to an hour until the pearls are translucent at the edge, then drain before adding.
- Stir or it weldsSago sinks and sticks. Simmer over low heat and stir often, as directed — the hour is not an exaggeration for a full cup of pearls, but check at 30 minutes.
- The egg yolks are the hingeBeaten yolks going into near-boiling broth will scramble. Temper them: whisk a ladle of hot broth into the yolks first, return the mixture to the pot, and take it off the heat as it thickens. The book's "boil up once" appears to mean only a brief return to the boil, but read cautiously — the yolks will curdle if it is taken literally.
- Cold water startBeef into cold unsalted water is deliberate — it draws out soluble protein and gelatin rather than sealing the meat, which is what makes the broth rich. Two pounds of shin, chuck or oxtail in two quarts, barely simmering for two to three hours, gets you to "falls to pieces".
- Beef steak teaTen minutes under a hot broiler leaves a one-pound steak medium at best; that is the point, since the juices are what is wanted. Press the chopped meat hard in a sieve or through a clean cloth. You recover most of the pint of water poured on, and the spent meat is left flavourless.
- YieldThe broth makes four to six servings. The beef tea makes one, and was never meant as anything else.
Six Little Cooks belongs to the genre of children's cookery books that taught girls a full domestic curriculum, and this seventh day's lesson is squarely in the sickroom department. Beef tea, made by extracting the juices from broiled or minced meat with hot water and discarding the fibre, was the standard nineteenth-century food for invalids, convalescents and small children, on the then-current belief that the strength of meat lay in its juices and that the fibrous part merely burdened a weak digestion. The chemistry turned out to be mostly wrong — largely a solution of salts and flavour compounds — though it stayed in home practice for decades. Sago, imported from Southeast Asia and cheap in Victorian grocers, was one of several ways to give such a broth body without anything a patient had to chew, and it appears throughout period invalid cookery alongside arrowroot, tapioca and barley.