Name: Beef Tea
Ingredients: 1 lb round steak; 1¾ cups cold water; coarse sea salt to taste

Beef Tea

Ingredients

1 lb round steak
1¾ cups cold water
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Prepare the meat

Remove fat from the meat and wipe it with a damp cloth.
Cut the meat into small pieces or grind it using a meat chopper.
Place the meat in a glass or stone jar, add cold water, and cover it.

Heat and serve

Put the jar on a rack in a kettle of cold water, and heat gradually to 130°F (54°C); maintain this temperature for 1½ hours.
Strain the mixture, pressing the meat to extract all the juice.
Season with coarse sea salt to taste and serve.

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

Round steak: Provides the meat whose juices form the flavourful liquid of the beef tea.
Cold water: Draws out the meat's juices gently during the long, low-temperature soak.

The step that matters

Heating gradually to 130°F (54°C) and holding it. Heating slowly and keeping the temperature low extracts juices from the meat without boiling it. Boiling would toughen the protein and cloud the liquid, so the temperature should stay steady for the full 1½ hours.

“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.