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Beef Extract
1/2 pound beef steak from round, cut 1 inch thick. Salt Remove fat and wipe steak with cloth wrung out of cold water. Place on heated wire broiler, broil 4 minutes, turn every 10 seconds for the first heated wire broiler, broil 4 minutes, turn every 10 seconds for the first minute, to prevent the escape of juices, turn occasionally for the next 10 minutes. Remove from broiler and cut into pieces of correct size to fit meat press or metal lemon squeezer. Make several cuts in pieces, put in press or lemon squeezer and express juice. Turn juice into cup, set in saucepan of hot water, season with salt and serve at once. Care must be taken that cup does not become hot enough to coagulate albuminous juices.
This is not a dish so much as a nursing procedure: a steak is seared, then crushed in a press so that its uncooked interior juices can be drunk warm. The final line is the whole point of the method and also the reason it cannot be recommended now.
- The hinge instruction is the hazard"Care must be taken that cup does not become hot enough to coagulate albuminous juices" means the juice must be held below roughly 140F. Everything that would make expressed meat juice safe to swallow happens above that line, so the recipe is built around not reaching it.
- The juice comes from the raw centreThe juice comes from the interior -- Broiling colours the outside; the pressed liquid is drawn from the interior, which in a piece cut to fit a lemon squeezer is likely to be rare or undercooked. Pressing through the cuts the recipe tells you to make may also carry surface bacteria inward.
- Who it was forInvalid cookery of this kind was aimed at the sick, the elderly, convalescents and small children. Those are precisely the groups for whom E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Listeria from undercooked beef carry the highest risk of severe illness. A current medical or dietetic source should be used for feeding anyone unwell.
- The garbled timingThe text as printed repeats a line and gives times that do not add up: four minutes of broiling, then a first minute of turning every ten seconds and ten further minutes of occasional turning. The duplication looks like a slip in the printed or transcribed text rather than a technique, and the intended time cannot be recovered from the page.
- Equipment that has goneA "meat press" was a small press sold for extracting juice from meat. The metal lemon squeezer offered as a substitute was probably the two-part hinged kind rather than a reamer, though the text does not say; neither belongs in contact with rare meat today.
- The idea behind it was wrongBeef juice was valued because its dissolved albumin and salts were thought to be concentrated nourishment. It is nearly all water, salt and flavour compounds, with very little protein or energy, which is why beef tea and beef juice disappeared from hospital diets in the twentieth century.
Expressed beef juice sat at the top of a whole family of nineteenth-century sickroom foods -- beef tea, beef essence, raw scraped beef -- that rested on the belief that the strengthening virtue of meat lay in its soluble juices rather than its fibre. The commercial trade in meat extracts, generally traced to Justus von Liebig's work in the 1840s and 50s, gave the idea scientific prestige, and the pressed-juice version was its home equivalent: no cooking of the liquid, because heat visibly clouded the albumin that was thought to be the nourishing part. Invalid cookery chapters were a fixture of household manuals well into the 1920s, when nursing a fever or a long convalescence still happened in the family bedroom rather than a hospital ward. Later research showed beef tea and beef juice to be little more than warm savoury water, and the sections quietly vanished from cookbooks as clinical nutrition took over.