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Beef-tea

A historical recipe from Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by Marion Cabell Tyree (1878).

A historical recipe

Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by Marion Cabell Tyree (1878). Project Gutenberg eBook #42450.

From an old book: a historical recipe, not current advice. Its methods, additives and storage may be unsafe by today's standards.

Source and licence

From Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by Marion Cabell Tyree (1878). Digitised by Project Gutenberg, eBook #42450 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42450). Public domain in the USA; its status may differ elsewhere.

Read the original Public domain in the USA

What was changed: As printed, from the book's text; Project Gutenberg's header and licence removed. Ingredient lines were read out of the text by a program. A historical recipe, not current advice.

United States. Associated with United States by the book is about Virginian cookery (Cooking, American -- Southern style); the recipe itself names no place (confidence 0.4). "Associated with" means only that the evidence named here links this recipe to that place. A recipe isn't labelled as representing an entire country because a source associates it with one, and regional origins are kept where the source gives them.

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Ingredients

Method

  1. Take half a pound fresh beef for every pint of beef-tea required.
  2. Carefully remove all fat, sinew, veins, and bone from the beef.
  3. Cut it in pieces under an inch square and let it soak twelve hours in one-third of the water required to be made into tea.
  4. Then take it out and let it simmer three hours in the remaining two-thirds of the water, the quantity lost by evaporation being replaced from time to time.
  5. The boiling liquor is then to be poured on the cold liquor in which the meat was soaked.
  6. The solid meat is to be dried, pounded in a mortar, and minced so as to cut up all strings in it, and mixed with the liquid.
  7. When the beef-tea is made daily, it is convenient to use one day's boiled meat for the next day's tea, as thus it has time to dry and is more easily pounded.
  8. Avoid having it sticky and too much jellied, when cold.