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The Sick Room
EGG GRUEL.-Boil eggs from one to three hours until hard enough to grate; then boil new milk and thicken with the egg, and add a little salt. Excellent in case of nausea.-MRS. BARTLETT.
GRUEL FOR INFANTS. - To make a gruel for infants suffering from marasmus, take one pint of goat's milk and the yolks of two eggs boiled sufficiently hard to reduce to an impalpable powder; add a pint of boiling water, a little salt or sugar, and administer by a nursing bottle. DR. SMALL.
BEEF TEA. To one pound of lean beef add one and one-half tumblers of cold water; cut the beef in small pieces, cover and let it boil slowly for ten minutes, and add a little salt after it is boiled. Excellent.
BEEF JELLY FOR INVALIDS.-Three small onions, three small or one and one-half large carrots, a few whole cloves and black pepper, one small teaspoon of sugar, one slice of ham, two calf's feet, one and a-half pounds of beef. Put in the onions and other ingredients in succession. Place the ham on top, then the calf's feet, and lastly the beef; no water; put on the side of the range, and let it stand until reduced to a soft mass, then add a quart of and let it boil one hour ; strain and let stand until 1. then take off the fat. Use by dissolving a little in cter.-MRS. J. A. ELLIS.
PANADA. Two thick slices of stale bread half an inch in thickness, cut off the crust, toast them a nice brown, cut them into squares of two inches in size, lay them in a bowl, sprinkle a little salt over them and pour on a pint of boiling water.
FEVER AND AGUE. - Four ounces galangal root in a quart of gin, steeped in a warm place; take often. -MRS.
These are invalid-cookery formulas from a period when the sick room was provisioned from the kitchen rather than the pharmacy. Two of the five items are unsafe by any current standard, and the page as a whole should be read as a document rather than a set of instructions.
- The infant gruel is the serious problemGoat's milk, water and egg yolk is not a substitute for breast milk or infant formula: the protein load strains an infant's kidneys and the mixture supplies almost no iron, folate or vitamin C. Fed to a child already wasting from marasmus, it accelerates the decline it was meant to reverse. Unpasteurised goat's milk carries an additional risk of brucellosis, campylobacter and listeria.
- The fever and ague tinctureFour ounces of galangal steeped in a quart of gin, taken "often," is an alcohol dose with no therapeutic basis. Ague meant malaria; the effective drug of the period was cinchona bark, and this formula is not one. Nothing here treats a fever.
- Beef tea is not nourishingA pound of lean beef simmered ten minutes yields a flavoured extract of water-soluble salts and gelatine with very little protein. Nineteenth-century physicians eventually said so plainly. It tastes of beef and does not feed anyone.
- Beef jelly, and the gaps in the textThe original as printed is damaged: "add a quart of" (almost certainly water or stock), "let stand until 1" (until cold), and "dissolving a little in cter" (hot water). Reduced without liquid on the cool end of a range for hours, the calf's feet supply the gelatine that sets the whole thing. Calf's feet are effectively a butcher-order item now.
- Egg gruelEggs boiled one to three hours become hard enough to grate, and the grated egg is stirred into scalded milk as a thickener; an egg already fully set is unlikely to curdle in hot milk, though the recipe does not explain itself. New milk means fresh whole milk, not skimmed.
- PanadaThe one item on the page that is still perfectly reasonable: toasted crustless bread, salt, boiling water. A pint of water to two thick slices makes a very thin sop, of the sort given to patients who could manage little solid food.
- Tumblers and measuresA tumbler is usually reckoned at about a cup in American cookbooks of this period, so the beef tea is about a cup and a half of water to a pound of meat. 'A little salt' and 'a few whole cloves' are left to the cook throughout.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in nearly every household manual of the later nineteenth century, because feeding the sick was a domestic duty rather than a hospital one — patients convalesced at home, often for months, and the kitchen was expected to produce beef teas, jellies, gruels and panadas on demand. Beef tea was the emblem of the genre, promoted heavily after Liebig's mid-century work on meat extracts and only later shown to carry almost no nutritive value; the commercial beef extracts that followed are its descendants. Panada, from the Latin panis, is far older and turns up in European sick-room and nursery cooking for centuries before this book. The contributions signed by neighbours and by a local doctor are typical of the community-compiled cookbook, where medical advice sat beside cake recipes with no change of tone, and where the line between food and medicine had not yet been drawn where we draw it now.