Name: Beef Tea
Ingredients: 2 pounds lean beef or mutton; boiling water

Beef Tea

Ingredients

2 pounds lean beef or mutton
boiling water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Mince the beef or mutton very finely.
Place it in a jar without water and cover it tightly.

Extract the gravy

Place the jar in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 1.5 hours until all the gravy is extracted.

Serve

Mix the rich stock with boiling water to achieve the desired strength.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Lean beef or mutton: Provides the meat juices that are slowly drawn out as the gravy that makes the tea.
Boiling water: Dilutes the rich stock to the strength the cook wants.

The step that matters

Place the jar in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 1.5 hours until all the gravy is extracted.. The jar must be sealed tightly so the meat cooks in its own juices without losing moisture to evaporation. Gentle, long heat draws the juices out of the muscle fibres while keeping the liquid concentrated rather than boiled away.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.