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Beef Tea
Place one pound of finely chopped lean beef in a wide-mouthed bottle, or in a fruit-jar. Add to it one-half pint of cold water, and let it stand for one hour, then place the bottle in a saucepan of cold water, place the pan on the fire, and heat the water slowly almost to the boiling point, but be careful not to let it boil. Cook in this way for two hours; then strain, and season with salt to taste.
The thick sediment that falls to the bottom of beef-tea after it has stood for a short time, is the most nutritious part of the preparation, yet many serve only the clear and poorer part to the patient.
A gentle water-bath extraction rather than a stock: no browning, no aromatics, and deliberately no boiling. The whole method turns on holding the jar below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilBoiling drives the soluble proteins out of solution as grey flecks and leaves a cloudy, weaker liquid. Coagulation begins some way below boiling, so read 'almost to the boiling point' generously and keep the surrounding water short of even a quiver; a thermometer is the easiest check.
- Leave the jar openA wide-mouthed bottle or fruit jar must be left uncapped or covered only with foil set loosely on top. A sealed jar heated for two hours can build pressure and crack. Stand it on a folded towel or a trivet so the glass is not in direct contact with the pan bottom.
- Sous-vide or low oven works betterSous-vide or a very low oven can hold the temperature more steadily -- an immersion circulator set around 175F needs no attention. Failing that, a pan of water over the lowest heat available with a thermometer in it; note that many domestic ovens will not hold a setting as low as this.
- The meatLean shin, round or chuck, all fat and sinew removed, chopped very fine or coarsely minced. Fat is the enemy here; it emulsifies into the liquid and makes it greasy in the mouth. A pound of lean beef to half a pint (one cup) of water is a very concentrated ratio, which is the point.
- The cold soak mattersThe cold soak -- the hour in cold water before heating starts the extraction of water-soluble proteins and the red pigment myoglobin before any heat is applied, which is presumably why the recipe specifies it.
- That sediment claimThe fine sediment is coagulated protein and it is worth stirring back in, but the nutritional promise behind the sentence is overstated. Beef tea is mostly water, salt and flavour compounds; the bulk of the protein stays in the spent meat, which is why its value as a food was disputed by medical writers through the later nineteenth century.
- Yield and keepingExpect a scant cup, sometimes a little more. Chill it promptly, lift off any set fat, and use within two days, or freeze in ice-cube trays. It is very rich; serve warm in a small cup, seasoned at the last moment.
Beef tea belongs to the great nineteenth-century enthusiasm for "invalid cookery", an entire genre of recipes for the sickroom. It sat alongside barley water, arrowroot gruel and calf's-foot jelly as the standard thing to put in front of someone recovering from fever, and its prestige owed much to Justus von Liebig, whose meat-extract work in the mid-century persuaded the public that the essence of beef could be drawn out into a liquid tonic. Florence Nightingale was among those who pushed back, noting in her Notes on Nursing that beef tea contained very little actual nourishment however good it made a patient feel; the defensive tone of the last sentence here, insisting on the sediment, reads like an echo of that long argument. What survives of the method today is the technique rather than the medicine: a slow, sub-simmer extraction that produces an intensely beefy clear liquid, to my mind closer to a Japanese dashi in handling than to a European brown stock.