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Seventh Day
Not long after the last lesson in cookery, Mrs. Vernon was taken ill, and was for some time afterward very feeble, requiring to be nourished with special dishes, which Grace and Mabel took great satisfaction in preparing for her, under their aunt's direction. The first time that they tried their hands at any of this "love-cooking," as Mabel called it, Aunt Jane gave them a host of recipes which they afterward made use of as occasion arose. "You must always remember," said Mrs. King, "that one of the great points in cooking for the sick, is to have things ready exactly at the time they are wanted. The fifteen or twenty minutes of delay while we are finishing something in the kitchen, and which passes without our perceiving it, is as long as hours to a sick person. If you know at what time anything is ordered, always begin long enough beforehand to allow for not only probable but improbable detentions. I shall never forget the mortification I felt when I undertook once to serve an egg on toast to a sick friend in the evening. The kitchen fire was a mass of dead coals and smouldering ashes, and my only servant was out; even if I could have made up another fire I couldn't have had any clear coals for toasting, so I made a compromise by holding some water in a little tin cup over a gas-burner, and half-boiling an egg in that! Then I spread a slice of bread and butter-not toast!-and emptied the egg over it. My friend had the complaisance to eat it; but I know it must have been a dreadful mess." "What could you have done any better, Aunt Jane?" asked Grace. "I could have told the maid, before she went out, to leave me a proper fire, which it is never safe to be without when there is sickness in the house; and I could have had on hand, what I afterwards bought, an arrangement which fastens on the gas fixture and heats water quite as soon as the flame of a fire. To be sure, I could not have made toast with it, but I could at least have accomplished a decent poached egg." "Will you let us make mamma's gruel to-day, Aunt Jane?" "Certainly, and as it is not time for it yet, I'll give you some recipes which you will find useful when you have the care of sick people yourselves, as may happen some time."
No. 77-OLD FASHIONED BEEF TEA.
One pound (or more) of lean beef (not one scrap of fat must be admitted)-cut into small pieces and put into a tightly-covered jar, without water. Set the jar into a pot of cold water, let this come gradually to a boil and then boil steadily for three or four hours, until the meat is like white rags. Then press the juice out, and season with salt, and, if permitted, a little pepper. This is the pure juice of the meat.
No. 78-LOUISA'S BEEF TEA.
Cut the beef (without fat,) into small pieces, say one inch cube, or thereabouts; put them in an open saucepan over the fire with a very little water-not nearly enough to cover them; take a strong, small iron spoon and press them constantly against the side of the saucepan until you see that every bit of blood is pressed out, and nothing is left but white, leathery lumps; remove these, strain the juice through a hair-sieve, if the broth is required . very clear, and flavor as above. An easily made and . nutritious food, which can be prepared in fifteen minutes. No. 79-MRS. MILLER'S BEEF TEA.
One lb. lean, juicy beef, one pint cold water, two even teaspoonfuls salt. Cut the beef in bits about an inch square, cover it with the cold water, and let it stand one hour. Heat it slowly over the fire till it reaches the boiling point, then strain and season. "They seem to be very much afraid we shall take fat beef, Aunt Jane," said Mabel. "The least particle of fat spoils the tea," answered Aunt Jane, "and as a person is supposed to read over only the one recipe she is using, of course the direction must be repeated each time. But here is something that ought perhaps to have come before the beef tea; in old times it would certainly have done so."
Three versions of the same thing: the pressed juice of lean beef, served as a hot savoury drink to an invalid. They differ only in how the juice is coaxed out, and all three depend on the same rule about fat.
- The fat rule is the whole recipeAunt Jane repeats it three times because it matters: rendered beef fat congeals into a greasy film as the tea cools, and that is exactly what a queasy patient cannot swallow. Trim aggressively and use a lean cut such as top round or eye of round.
- The covered jar is a bain-marieIn No. 77 the jar sits in a pot of water so the meat never exceeds boiling point and no water dilutes the juice. A canning jar with the ring on loosely, standing on a folded towel in a stockpot, does the job; keep the water topped up over three to four hours.
- "Until the meat is like white rags"This is the doneness cue in Nos. 77 and 78; No. 79 gives none, being strained as soon as it reaches the boiling point. The white, leathery, exhausted appearance means the myoglobin and soluble juices have left the fibres. The spent meat is discarded, not eaten.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair, a standard fine strainer of the period. Two layers of damp cheesecloth in a mesh strainer give a clearer result.
- Mrs. Miller's cold soakNo. 79 steeps raw beef in cold water for an hour to draw out the juices before heating. Do the soaking in the refrigerator, not on the counter, and note that the liquid only reaches the boiling point before being strained — serve it at once rather than holding it warm.
- SaltTwo even teaspoons to a pint is assertive by modern standards. Season to taste at the end instead.
- YieldA pound of lean beef gives perhaps half a cup or so of true pressed juice by the jar method, and rather more from Mrs. Miller's water-based version.
- What it actually deliversBeef tea is mostly water, salt, gelatin fragments and flavour compounds; very little protein crosses into the liquid. It is a palatable warm drink, not nourishment, so do not treat it as a substitute for food.
Beef tea belongs to "invalid cookery," a standard department of nineteenth-century domestic manuals alongside gruels, arrowroot, panada and wine whey u2014 dishes for a household nursing its own sick, since hospitals were for the poor and most illness was seen through at home. Its authority rested on the widely held belief that the red juice of meat carried its strength, an idea given commercial form by the meat-extract industry that grew up in the 1860s. Physicians and nurses of the later century, Florence Nightingale among the sceptics, began pointing out that beef tea contained almost nothing to sustain a patient, and by the early twentieth century analytical chemistry had settled the question. What survives here is less a nutritional program than a code of conduct: the insistence on exact timing, on a fire kept ready through the night, on the tray arriving the moment it is wanted u2014 what Mabel calls "love-cooking."