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Raw Beef Sandwich
Scrape beef with dull knife, place between buttered slices of bread. Cut in fancy shapes. Toast in oven. (Meat for this purpose must be inspected.)
This is a sickroom recipe, and the problem is precisely the combination it depends on: barely-cooked scraped beef served to the person least able to withstand a foodborne illness.
- Scraped beef is not steakScraping with a dull knife pulps the muscle and can drag surface bacteria through the whole mass, much as grinding does. A whole cut can be seared safely because its interior is normally free of pathogens; scraped beef has no protected interior left.
- The toasting does nothing usefulEnough oven time to brown two slices of bread will not bring a filling insulated between buttered bread anywhere near the 160F/71C at which E. coli O157:H7 is reliably destroyed. The dish is functionally raw beef in the middle.
- "Must be inspected" meant something narrower than it soundsFederal meat inspection after 1906 certified that the animal was not diseased and the plant was sanitary. It made no claim about pathogens on the cut meat, and a modern inspection mark is likewise not a guarantee that meat is free of pathogens.
- Invalid cookery is the worst place for the riskA recipe of this kind is intended for the sick and convalescent, among the groups in whom E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria infections turn severe. The intended eater has the least margin.
- What to do insteadIf you want the same idea — soft, savoury, easy to chew — use a current recipe for a fully cooked minced or shredded beef filling, cooked to temperature before it goes near the bread.
Scraped beef belonged to a whole family of nineteenth-century invalid foods built on the belief that raw or nearly raw meat delivered strength in its most concentrated form: beef tea, beef juice pressed from a warmed steak, raw beef pulp, and this sandwich. Scraping rather than chopping was deliberate it separated the tender fibre from connective tissue, giving something a weak patient could swallow without effort, and doctors of the period genuinely prescribed it for anaemia and convalescence from fever. The parenthetical warning about inspection may reflect the anxieties that followed the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, when the printed reassurance of inspection was still new enough to be worth invoking, though that is an inference rather than a datable fact. The germ theory of disease had been accepted for decades by then, and some of the organisms that make pulped raw beef dangerous were described early on, while others were recognised much later: E. coli O157:H7 in 1982, and foodborne Listeria in the 1980s.