Beef Tea
Take two pounds of lean rump beef, remove all fat, cut into small pieces and place in a tightly corked bottle. Place the bottle in a deep saucepan of cold water, reaching two-thirds of the way to the top of the bottle, place over a slow fire, and keep it boiling slowly for fifteen minutes, take out the bottle, pour out the liquor, and use as required.
This is a Victorian sickroom preparation rather than a soup in any ordinary sense, and two features of the method put it outside what should be attempted now.
- The corked bottle is the main problemHeating a tightly stoppered glass bottle in boiling water creates steam pressure inside it with nowhere to go. Either the cork fires out or the bottle fails, in both cases throwing scalding liquid and possibly glass.
- The meat is never reliably cookedThe meat may never reach a safe temperature -- A cold bottle packed with raw beef, set in cold water and brought up slowly, may not hold its contents hot enough for long enough within fifteen minutes. The liquor is extracted at gentle heat rather than properly cooked, and it should not be assumed safe to hand to an invalid, who is the person this was made for.
- Why beef tea was made this wayNineteenth-century dietetics held that boiling "destroyed the goodness" of meat, so the gentlest possible heat was thought to preserve nourishment. We now know beef tea carries very little protein and is mostly water, salts and flavour compounds; the nutritional argument that justified the risk does not hold.
- Rump, lean, and no fatThe instruction to remove all fat is not fussiness: cold beef tea sets with a fat cap that period writers held to be indigestible for the sick. Lean rump would have been chosen for its flavour and for a clearer liquor.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef treated this way gives surprisingly little liquor; the recipe itself states no quantity and no dose, only 'use as required'. Anyone wanting beef broth or consomme today should follow a current recipe with an open pot and a proper simmer.
Beef tea belongs to the vast nineteenth-century literature of invalid cookery, a genre that recurs in household manuals of the period and that put the burden of nursing squarely on the woman of the house. Its prestige owed a good deal to Justus von Liebig, whose mid-century work on meat extracts persuaded doctors and cooks alike that the soluble matter drawn from beef was the concentrated essence of its nourishment, a claim that Florence Nightingale, among others, publicly doubted. The corked-bottle method was one of several competing techniques, prized because it kept the extract from being diluted by the surrounding water and because the meat itself was insulated from the boiling water around it.