No. 377

Beef Juice

Jus de Boeuf

In order to obtain a pint of beef juice it will take about five pounds of meat free from all fat and nerves; cut it into about five-eighth of an inch thick slices; broil them nicely, not too rare or too well done, and after taking them from the broiler, cut them up into five-eight inch squares, and press them well in the press shown in Fig. 70, to extract all their juice; when it is all well pressed out, strain it through a fine sieve or napkin, remove all the fat from the surface and serve in small cups.

← No. 376 Mulled Egg and Almond Milk Thickened with Ri Broths & Soups for Invalids No. 378 Puree of Barley with Chicken Broth →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is expressed raw beef serum, not a cooked broth, and it belongs to a vanished school of invalid feeding. The notes below explain what the instructions mean and why the result cannot be recommended today.

The juice is never cookedThe slices are broiled "not too rare or too well done", so the interior stays underdone; the liquid squeezed out afterwards is essentially uncooked meat serum. It is then strained, skimmed and served straight into cups, so nothing in the process brings the drink itself to a temperature that would kill E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella or Listeria.
The intended drinker is the worst possible oneThis sits in a chapter of food for the sick. The people it was made for — convalescents, the very young, the elderly — are exactly the group for whom an infective dose of a foodborne pathogen is smallest and the consequences most severe. A current recipe for a clear beef broth, simmered and strained, should be used instead.
Cutting increases the exposed surfaceAfter broiling, the slices are diced into five-eighths-inch squares, which opens up the raw interior and any surface bacteria dragged inward by the knife. The pressing then collects liquid from all of those cut faces at once.
The press in Fig. 70Ranhofer means a mechanical meat press of the kind used in professional kitchens of the period. Nothing in a modern domestic kitchen corresponds to it, and improvising with a potato ricer or muslin does not change the food-safety problem.
The yield is the striking partFive pounds of trimmed lean beef for one pint of juice, roughly three fluid ounces of juice per pound of meat. "Free from all fat and nerves" means trimmed of fat, silverskin, tendon and sinew, so the starting weight of untrimmed beef was higher still.
Beef juice is not beef teaBeef tea, in the same tradition, is meat steeped in water and heated; beef juice is the undiluted expressed liquid with no water and no cooking. Recipes of the period distinguish them carefully, and the distinction is the whole reason this one is unsafe while a simmered broth is not.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and the section on broths and soups for invalids reflects a period when the chef of a great restaurant was expected to cook for the sick as well as for banquets. Nineteenth-century medicine held that a weakened patient could not digest solid food but could absorb its "nutriment" in concentrated liquid form, an idea reinforced by the enormous commercial success of Liebig's Extract of Meat and its imitators from the 1860s onward. Beef juice, beef tea and raw meat pulp were prescribed in hospitals and sickrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, and the small cups here are a dosing measure as much as a serving suggestion. The theory did not survive analysis: by the early twentieth century chemists had shown that such preparations carry very little protein and function mainly as salty, savoury stimulants, and the practice faded as nutritional science and, later, an understanding of foodborne pathogens caught up with it.