Beef Tea

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Beef Tea

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Author Sidney Morse

This century-old recipe is a nutritious and tasty help for those who are under the weather.

Ingredients

• The recipe is printed as originally written in the 1917 edition of The New Household Discoveries, which does not include a separate ingredients list.

Instructions

1. For the most nourishing kind of beef tea, choose a piece of meat from the lower part of the round. There is more juice in a piece of the animal which has been toughened by steady exercise than in a very tender cut. If we wish to keep in the juices, the meat should be seared on the outside by exposing it to a strong heat, as in roasting, broiling, or boiling, but in this case the fiber should be rejected.
2. Free from fat, put through the finest knife of the meat chopper, and cover with a pint of cold water. Heat slowly in a double boiler. In two hours the juices will be drawn out and the fiber left bleached white. A square of wet cheese cloth may be doubled and spread over a strainer, and through this the chopped meat be wrung perfectly dry. The juice out to be red. If it cooks long it will turn brown; then the albumen, which we wish to preserve in liquid form, would coagulate, taking from the beef tea most of its nutrition.
3. If the patient objects to the uncooked look of beef tea, serve in a red tumbler which is well heated, because the liquid cannot be brought to the boiling point.

Notes

Morse, Sidney, ed. The New Household Discoveries: An Encyclopedia of Recipes and Processes. Petersburg, NY: Success Company, 1917, p. 657.