Beef-tea
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the beef
Choose freshly killed beef, remove all skin and fat, and cut it into small pieces.
Shred the beef to allow the water to mix better, if time permits.
Place the beef in a stone jar with cold water and salt, cover it, and let it sit for 10 minutes.
Cook
Put the jar in a saucepan with boiling water around it and cook for 1 hour, adding more water if it boils away.
After 30 minutes, open the jar and separate the beef with two forks to prevent clumping, then re-cover and return it to the saucepan.
Strain and serve
Once cooked, pour off the beef tea into a basin, pressing the meat with a spoon to extract all the juice.
If any fat floats on top, remove it with porous paper or let the tea cool and skim it off with a heated spoon.
Serve hot with thin dry toast cut into small pieces.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Lean beef
- Provides the meat juices that flavour the tea and give it its body.
- Cold water
- Slowly draws out the juices from the meat as it heats, forming the tea.
The step that matters
Adding the beef to cold water and cooking gently in a jar set in boiling water. Gentle, indirect heat keeps the liquid from boiling hard, which would toughen the meat and cloud the tea. Starting with cold water lets juices extract gradually into the liquid.
“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.
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