1. Remove all the fat and skin from one pound of fresh gravy beef; cut it up in small pieces, and put it in a stone jar with a pint of cold water and a little salt. Replace the lid of the jar, and let it stand all night. The next morning place the jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and let it simmer gently, but never boil, for five hours. Strain the fluid from the beef through a colander.

It must be borne in mind that beef-tea made in this way is, as well as the patent beef-teas and beef-juices, not a food in the true sense of the word, but rather a stimulant. Such beef-teas contain little or no albumen, and only a very slight amount of gelatine, but they hold in solution the sapid extractives and salines of the meat. The universal experience, however, is that beef-tea is to the sick and weak a valuable restorative, though it must never be forgotten that it is not nourishing.

2. Whole Beef-Tea

Make the beef-tea as in the previous case, but instead of throwing away the residue of the meat, pound it in a mortar into a pulp, pass it through a wire sieve and add it to the beef-tea. The beef-tea made by this method is thoroughly nutritious, as all the fibre and albumen of the meat are contained in it.

3. Peptonised Beef-Tea (Sir William Roberts' Recipe)

Mix half a pound of finely minced lean beef with half a pint of water and 20 grains of bicarbonate of sodium. Let it simmer for an hour. Remove from the fire, and when it has cooled down to a lukewarm temperature add a table-spoonful of liquor pancreaticus.1 Then set the mixture aside for three hours, wrapped in a tea cosy or flannel to maintain the temperature, and occasionally shake it. At the end of this time decant the liquid portion and boil it for a few seconds. Boiling stops the process of digesting, which should not be allowed to go beyond a certain point, or otherwise the beef-tea becomes bitter and unpalatable.

Beef-tea prepared in this way is as rich in albuminates as milk. When seasoned with salt it is scarcely distinguishable in taste from ordinary beef-tea. By being partly pre-digested it is eminently suitable for invalids whose digestive organs are in a much weakened condition. Care should, however, be taken not to continue the use of predigested foods too long after the stomach has begun to recover tone, else that organ becomes demoralised, and may lose the power of normal digestion.

4. Raw Meat-Juice (Dr. Cheadle's Recipe)

To one part of best rump steak finely minced add one fourth the amount of cold water. Stir well together, and allow the beef to soak for half an hour, then place the whole in a piece of muslin or cambric, and forcibly express all the juice by firm twisting.

By this method a highly nutritious and nitrogenous food is obtained, containing no less than five per cent. of albumen. In Dr. Cheadle's opinion raw meat-juice is the most easily digested and restorative of all animal foods, and the most valuable of all nitrogenous preparations for children.

1 Liquor pancreaticus is made from beef pancreas. Pancreatine has, like pepsine, the power of digesting albumen and turning it into soluble albumose. The preparations of pancreatine are much more reliable than those of pepsine. Zymine is also a most useful preparation, and food is rapidly peptonised by it.

5. Beef Balls Raw

Scrape with a knife all the juice out of a fresh rump steak, leaving nothing but the fibrous tissue behind. Mix with cream and roll into balls. Heat a baking tin very hot, and roll the balls rapidly over the hot surface. Sometimes a drop of cherry brandy is added to each ball to mask the flavour; but I have found that rolling the balls over a hot tin and the addition of cream will take away both their objectional appearance and raw flavour, while the condition of rawness remains really unaltered. This is a very valuable food in acute gastritis; also in gastric catarrh, when solid food is ill tolerated.