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Beef Tea
Procure some lean rump of beef, remove every particle of fat, cut into small pieces and place in a champagne bottle, cork and tie down tightly. Place the bottle in a deep saucepan of cold water, reaching two-thirds of the way to the top of the bottle, place the pan on a slow fire, and allow it to come slowly to a boil. After boiling for fifteen minutes, take out the bottle, pour out the liquor, and use as required.
This is invalid cookery — a restorative broth for the sick — and the method is the problem. Sealing meat in a corked, wired bottle and boiling it turns a kitchen vessel into a pressure vessel.
- The sealed bottle is the hazardA cork tied down tightly gives the expanding air and steam inside nowhere to go. Champagne bottles are built for pressure at cellar temperature, not for a fifteen-minute boil, and a failure sends hot glass and near-boiling liquid across the room.
- Nothing vents, nothing is measuredThere is no gauge, no relief, and no way to judge internal pressure by eye. Modern water-bath and pressure work is defined by measured temperatures, timed holds and vessels rated for the job; none of that is present here.
- Fifteen minutes is not a cookFifteen minutes is not a verified cook -- The recipe fixes a time but never a temperature, and gives no way to know how hot the sealed contents actually became; the liquor is treated as ready the moment the bottle comes out of the pan.
- It was fed to the vulnerableBeef tea was made for the sick, the convalescent and the elderly — precisely the people least able to tolerate an underheated meat extract. That intent makes the loose handling of temperature worse rather than more forgivable.
- The nutritional premise is wrongVictorian medicine believed the expressed juice of beef carried its "strength." It carries mostly flavour compounds, extractives and salts, with very little nourishment; a patient living on it is living on almost nothing.
- If you want beef teaUse a current recipe with an open or loosely covered vessel and a stated temperature. This one should be read, not followed.
Beef tea belongs to the nineteenth-century sickroom rather than the dining room, and its appearance in a Waldorf book is a reminder that a grand hotel also fed guests who were unwell. The idea that the juice of raw beef held its nourishing essence was given scientific respectability by Justus von Liebig's meat extract in the mid-1800s, and the bottled water-bath method — meat sealed in glass, set in a pan of water, the liquor poured off — appears in the invalid-cookery chapters of a number of English and American household books. Florence Nightingale was among those who doubted it, remarking in her Notes on Nursing that beef tea contained little actual sustenance, and later analysis bore her out: what the bottle yields is flavour and salts, not food. Oscar Tschirky records one version of the method at the tail end of a long belief that a cup of clear brown liquid could carry a body through illness.