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Soup for Invalids (Sweets or puddings but even)
sweets, or puddings; but even of these a smaller quantity than usual will suffice. With regard to adding wine in making jellies, it must always be ascertained whether it is forbidden; for in many cases jelly without wine would be advantageous, while the addition would be altogether wrong. The following list of receipts comprises those which are peculiarly applicable to the invalid; those which are also employed in ordinary cookery being to be found in the chapters devoted to that subject.
BEEF-TEA. 1210. Take one pound of lean beef, pick all the fat off; cut it into small pieces the size of the end of the thumb, and score it still further to let out the gravy; put it in an enamelled saucepan with a quart of water, two cloves, eight to twelve peppercorns, and half a tea-spoonful of salt. Simmer for three or four hours, and skim it as long as either scum or fat rises, or else it curdles. In cases of extreme debility, one pound and a half of beef may be used. Before serving, absorb every globule of fat with silver paper.
Another Mode (very grateful in convalescence, when there is no tendency to diarrhea). Put in a preserving jar alternate layers of beef, cut into small pieces, and sliced turnips; when the jar is filled, place it in a water-bath, or slow oven, and let it remain for two or three hours; then drain off all the tea, using a little pressure to assist the operation, and let it stand till cold, when any fat may be taken off, or, if wanted directly, it may be removed while hot with silver paper. Another (quickly made). -Take a piece of skirtings of beef, of the size of a walnut, scrape it well, then pour a tea-cup of boiling water upon it, and it is fit to drink when cool.
Three methods for beef-tea sit side by side here, and they are not equivalent: the first two cook the meat for hours, while the third is a cup of raw beef infusion. That last one is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The third method is raw beef juiceA walnut-sized piece of scraped beef steeped in a teacup of boiling water and drunk cool never reaches a temperature that kills E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella or Campylobacter. The water cools within seconds of contact with cold meat, and the whole point of the preparation is that the juice is extracted rather than cooked. Feeding it to someone already weakened by illness inverts the intention.
- Why it was thought safeNineteenth-century opinion often held that heat destroyed the nourishing principle of meat, so raw or barely warmed beef juice was thought stronger food than boiled broth. Either way, the protein is not meaningfully damaged by simmering, and the pathogen risk was invisible to them.
- The second method is also undercookedLayers of beef and turnip sealed in a jar and held in a water-bath or slow oven for two to three hours may or may not bring the centre of the jar to a safe temperature, and the recipe states no temperature and gives no way to know. Prepared beef broth or a current recipe with stated temperatures should be used instead.
- Silver paperProbably a fine tissue paper rather than metal foil, laid on the surface to blot up fat; the term was used loosely in the period. Chilling the tea and lifting off the set fat does the same job.
- SkirtingsSkirt, the thin diaphragm muscle: lean, coarse-grained and an inexpensive cut.
- Enamelled saucepanProbably specified because bare iron and copper were thought to taint long-simmered meat liquor; the recipe gives no reason. Any non-reactive pan -- stainless, enamel, glass -- answers the same purpose.
- The curdling warningThe instruction to skim as long as scum rises "or else it curdles" matches what happens in the pan: coagulated albumin left on the surface breaks up and clouds the liquid.
History: Beef-tea was a central item of British sickroom cookery through much of the nineteenth century, and its authority came as much from doctors as from cooks: it was commonly prescribed and its quantity regulated. The chapter's opening remarks here -- checking whether wine in jelly is forbidden, keeping quantities small -- show the cook working under medical direction rather than her own judgement. Liebig's meat extract, marketed commercially from the 1860s, rested on the same belief that the nourishment of beef could be concentrated into a cup of savoury liquid, a belief later deflated when analysis showed such extracts to carry little protein, being largely salt and flavour compounds. That the book offers a raw version as the quickest is a reminder that invalid cookery of the period was governed by theories of vital principle, not by any understanding of foodborne infection.