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Beef Juice
When much nourishment must be given in small compass, the best nurses now prepare beef juice. This is made of the round of beef cut at least an inch thick. Take a piece of the meat about four inches square, place it in a wire broiler, and broil it over a bright fire until both sides have been browned and the meat has been well warmed through to start the juices. If the fire is bright, two minutes of broiling will generally be sufficient. Lay the beef on a plate, sprinkle it with salt, cut it in pieces, place in a small piece of cheesecloth or a presser, and squeeze out all the juice. About three tablespoons of juice will usually result from a piece of meat the size mentioned.
Sufficient juice for two servings is generally prepared at one time, and the second portion will, of course, require warming. This must be done very carefully, as too high a degree of heat will cause the juice to coagulate. Place the juice in a cup, set the cup in boiling water, stir the juice constantly until it is a little above blood heat, and then serve.
This is essentially expressed raw beef serum, deliberately kept below the temperature at which its proteins set — which is also below any temperature that would make it safe to drink. It belongs to a period of invalid cookery that predates any understanding of enteric pathogens in beef.
- The meat is never cookedTwo minutes over a bright fire browns the outside and warms the interior only enough to loosen the juices. The interior stays raw, and it is precisely that raw interior fluid that is pressed out and served.
- Why it cannot be brought up to temperatureThe recipe warns that heat will coagulate the juice, and it is right: the serum proteins set into shreds well below 160F, so the dish as written is defined by staying under a temperature that would make it safe.
- Blood heat is incubation heat"A little above blood heat" is roughly 100F, which is close to the optimum growth range for E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella. Holding pressed raw beef fluid there, then serving it slowly to a sick person, is the worst case rather than a neutral one.
- The intended drinker is the worst candidateThis was made for invalids, infants and convalescents — exactly the immunocompromised group for whom a low infective dose of a shiga-toxin-producing strain can mean kidney failure. Modern clinical nutrition uses no raw meat preparations for these patients.
- Surface browning does not sterilise the interiorContamination on a whole cut sits on the outside, but slicing the warm beef and squeezing it through cloth carries surface organisms straight into the collected juice. The cheesecloth and presser are themselves difficult to sanitise.
- "Presser"A small meat press used to squeeze juice from the cut pieces, the alternative the recipe gives to cheesecloth. The round is the lean rear-leg cut.
- If you want the nourishmentUse a current recipe for a well-cooked beef broth or a clinically formulated oral nutrition product; do not attempt to adapt this one.
Beef juice, beef tea and "essence of beef" were staples of late-nineteenth-century sickroom feeding, and the note that "the best nurses now prepare beef juice" suggests a shift in fashion: long-simmered beef tea had been shown by chemists to contain very little actual protein, mostly salts and extractives, and pressed raw juice was promoted in its place as retaining more of the meat's virtue. The phrase "much nourishment in small compass" is the whole argument — a patient who could swallow only a few spoonfuls was to get concentrated nutriment rather than volume. That reasoning survives in modern enteral nutrition; the method does not, because the recognition of shiga-toxin-producing E. coli in the 1980s came long after this advice was set in type.