Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Beef Jelly
Beef Jelly
Prepare some beef tea with very little if any salt, and without adding water. Place an eighth of an ounce of gelatine in a saucepan with a little cold water and soak it; let it stay there until sufficiently swollen, then place on the fire and boil until dissolved. Take the beef-tea extract when nearly cold, add the gelatine, stir well and allow it to become well set.
A convalescent dish rather than a dinner course: concentrated beef tea set with just enough gelatine to hold a spoon shape. The whole point is concentration, so nothing about the method should be diluted.
- The hinge: no added waterBeef tea here means meat juices drawn from lean beef with the minimum liquid, not a stock topped up as it reduces. If you add water to keep the pan covered, the finished jelly tastes thin and will not carry itself on the palate.
- Making the beef teaThe recipe assumes you already know how; one common period proportion is about 1 lb of finely chopped lean beef, free of fat and sinew, to a pint of cold water, soaked half an hour then brought up slowly, though quantities vary considerably from book to book. For safety, bring it to at least 160F and hold it there rather than following the old advice to keep it below a simmer; strain, and skim every trace of fat or the jelly will set cloudy with a greasy cap.
- An eighth of an ounce of gelatineAbout 3.5 g, roughly one rounded teaspoon of powdered gelatine, or one to two leaves depending on grade. At about a cup of liquid that gives a conventional set; for the softer, spoonable consistency wanted for an invalid, the same gelatine would be carried in rather more liquid.
- Soaking and dissolvingCold water first until the granules swell, then gentle heat only until clear. Prolonged hard boiling degrades gelatine and costs you setting strength, so take it off the moment it goes transparent.
- "Nearly cold" needs qualifyingDissolved gelatine poured into genuinely cold liquid seizes into threads. Have the beef tea warm to the hand, around 100-110F, and stir the gelatine in steadily; the mixture can then be chilled.
- Setting and yieldFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a clean turn-out. The yield is small either way: expect only one or two invalid-sized servings from a batch.
- SaltThe instruction to use little or none reflects the sickroom diets of the period. For eating as a savoury jelly rather than as a restorative, season the beef tea before setting it, since a cold jelly reads as blander than the same liquid does hot.
- KeepingThis is unpreserved cooked meat liquid with no salt to speak of. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use it within two days.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century sickroom, where meat juice was regarded as the most digestible form of nourishment for someone who could not manage solid food; whole chapters of Victorian household manuals are given over to it, and the commercial extracts of the period were sold on the same premise. Setting it with a little gelatine turned a drink into something a patient could take by the spoonful, which is the reason a jelly this plain earned a place in a book otherwise concerned with terrapin and canvasback duck. The nutritional claim did not survive scrutiny: by the later nineteenth century chemists were already establishing that beef tea is largely water, salts and gelatinous matter with very little actual protein, and its reputation as a restorative faded accordingly.