The housekeeper's companion

Beef Tea is the staple of existence in many cases of illness; it is food and physic both in some fevers. It must be most carefully made, on Liebig's principles. The heat employed should not exceed 150° F. A thermometer, however, is not commonly at hand, but the meat should be cut up small and merely covered with water, in a bottle jar, in a sauce pan with cold water, near a fire, so as not to allow it to boil, but merely to stew for three or four hours. The fat may be separated by allowing it to get cold and then skimming it off. Mutton-broth might be made on the same plan, and would be more nourishing than that commonly made. In the ordinary way of making beef tea, by boiling lumps of meat, a strong jelly may be formed, and is supposed to show its strength; but each lump is really case-hardened, and the most nourishing part locked up in each piece. The explanation is that flesh consists largely of albumen, which coagulates at 150° F.; therefore the boiling temperature, 212° F., hardens the outer part at once, and slowly the interior. To give a culinary illustration, the best way to cook a boiled joint of meat is to put it into water already boiling, and continue boiling the requisite time; the outside is at once hardened, and the gravy is locked up inside. Eggs. — For the same reason the white of eggs, which consists wholly of albumen, is a most excellent medium of nutriment, where, for any reason, beef tea cannot be given. The white of egg stirred into cold or lukewarm milk can often be given to children or other patients who refuse beef tea. It is tasteless and colorless, therefore its presence can be disguised; whereas the yolk of egg contains fatty matters with albumea, and is easily recognized by the child both from its color and its flavor. Water, either as an ordinary article of diet or a means of allaying the thirst in febrile states, requires that great care shall be taken to ensure that it shall be free from impurities. The most dangerous impurities to which water is obnoxious are gaseous matters, and insoluble animal and vegetable matters. Gaseous matters and vapors are readily absorbed by water, as seen in the ordinary experience of placing a basin or tub of water in a newly painted room, whereby the smell of the paint is quickly removed. Water, by reason of the same property, should never be drank from a cistern into which there is a waste pipe having a direct communication with a drain or reservoir. The poisonous gases arising from the decomposing sewage are absorbed by the water, which thus becomes the vehicle for the conveyance of the poison of malignant fevers. The decomposing animal and saline matters of sewage also readily percolate a porous soil; so that if a well and cesspool be near one another, as is often the case both in town and country, the water becomes the channel through which deadly poison is carried. Rain water received into leaden cisterns, or water in tanks having leaden pipes leading from them, is often contaminated by a portion of that metal becoming oxidized and dissolved, producing colic and other signs of lead poisoning.