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Scraped Raw Beef Sandwiches
Scrape very fine two or three tablespoons of fresh, juicy raw beef, season it slightly with pepper and salt, spread it between two thin slices of lightly buttered bread, and cut for serving into little diamond shapes, two and onehalf inches long and one inch wide. MEATS-Of meats, none is so juicy and appetizing as a beefsteak from a proper cut and properly cooked. Pork and veal should never be given in any form to a sick person.
Some physicians claim that venison is the most easily digested and assimilated of meats, and class mutton next and beef third; but beef can often be eaten when no other variety of meat can even be tasted.
This is a raw-meat preparation intended for people who were already ill, and it cannot be recommended in any form today. The points below explain the specific failures rather than how to adapt it.
- No kill step at allThe beef is scraped, seasoned and eaten. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that inactivates E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella or Campylobacter, and a very small dose of O157:H7 is enough to cause illness.
- Scraping spreads surface contaminationPathogens on beef live on the cut surface, where cooking normally destroys them. Scraping or grinding drags that surface bacteria all through the mass, which is exactly why whole steak can be served rare and minced beef cannot.
- The intended eater is the worst candidateThis sits in a chapter of invalid cookery. The sick, the elderly, the very young and anyone immunocompromised are the group most likely to progress from gastroenteritis to haemolytic uraemic syndrome or bacteraemia.
- "Fresh, juicy raw beef" is not a specificationThe recipe gives no cut, no source, no holding temperature and no time limit between butchering and eating. Nineteenth-century confidence in the butcher's morning delivery is not a food-safety control.
- Tartare is not the same thingSteak tartare in a restaurant depends on a specific supply chain, whole-muscle beef trimmed and minced to order, and rules that vary by country. None of that is implied by "scrape two or three tablespoons of raw beef."
- The surrounding advice is dated tooThe note that pork and veal should never be given to the sick is consistent with period concerns about pork (trichinosis among them) and with the common claim that veal was hard to digest; the recipe itself gives no reason. Either way it does not reflect current dietetics. If you are cooking for someone recovering from illness, follow current medical or dietetic guidance.
Raw scraped beef was a mainstay of invalid feeding on both sides of the Atlantic from roughly the 1870s through the First World War, sitting alongside beef tea, beef juice pressed from a warmed steak, and raw-meat pulp given by teaspoon to children with wasting illnesses. The reasoning was that heat "hardened" albumen and drove off the nourishing juices, so the least-cooked meat was held to be the most digestible and the most restorative for typhoid and consumption patients. Scraping with a spoon or dull knife, rather than chopping, was the standard technique: it lifted the soft muscle fibre and left the connective tissue behind, producing something a weak patient could swallow without chewing. The Butterick book's ranking of venison, mutton and beef by digestibility belongs to the same tradition of dietary hierarchies, which were widely repeated in household manuals and rested on physicians' clinical impressions rather than on measurement. The germ theory of disease was well established by 1900, but the link between minced beef and specific enteric pathogens was not, and O157:H7 was not identified until the 1980s.