Beef Tea

Ingredients

• tin of beef-tea
• a breakfast-cup full of a liquid called beef-tea

Method

1. 1

   Simmer gravy-beef until well cooked, strain, and serve as beef-tea.

2. 2

   It can be eaten cold as jelly or warmed as needed.

As published

This recipe was extracted from The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c (1880), page 30. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

Beef -tea, and good, genuine beef-tea too, can now be ob- tained in tins, and I would strongly recommend this form of beef-tea to those who doubt their own ability to manufacture the article from gravy -beef direct. There is probably no form of medicine, if it may be so called, so valu- able in the sick-room, and especially the convalescent sick-room, as beef-tea. Medical men who attend patients of the poorer classes, I fear, sometimes fail to grasp the idea of the helplessness and ignorance of even elementary cooking that too often marks the working man’s wife. The patient is ordered beef-tea, but he gets greasy ditch-water. I will take a higher case. Beef -tea is ordered ; the patient has to take nourishment, but loathes food. The gravy-beef is bought, cut up, and simmered, and after a time strained, and a breakfast-cup full of a liquid called beef -tea is brought up. It is white in colour, with a brown sedi- ment, which, if left to stand, will settle at the bottom. The popular belief is that this sediment contains the good- ness, whereas the contrary is the case. We will suppose that the beef -tea has been really well made, and that when cold it is a nice jelly. The patient takes a few spoonfuls and puts the cup down. It is left by the bedside. Alas ! what too often happens, even in good families, where every precaution is taken '! In an hour or two’s time the patient turns to the discarded cup, and makes another effort to swallow a few spoonfuls now it is cold, for often sick patients can take beef-tea cold when they cannot touch it hot, the very smell of any cook- 16 CROSSE AND BLACKWELL'S ing being sufficient to set them against it. On turning to the cup, what meets the eye ? The beef -tea has settled and cooled, and on the top four or five large wafers of white fat appear floating. It is a trifle, perhaps, but life is made up of trifles. It is quite enough. The very idea of grease at such a time is horrible, and the poor weak patient turns away once more disgusted. Of course, beef- tea can be made at home from fresh gravy-beef, and the fat properly re- moved, every speck of fat, but how often is it really done? A tin of beef-tea

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.