Invalid Cooking

Look at the title of this post again; there are two ways to pronounce it. We mean both: cooking that is not valid (in-VAL-id) and cooking for those who are incapacitated (the archaic IN-vul-id). From our point of view, both apply to a food item we learned about this weekend: beef tea.

Let that steep in: beef tea. 

It is, unfortunately, just what it sounds like and it is a real thing, though not at Casa Hayes-Boh.

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We heard about it on The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel (s4e8) on the same weekend that I was preparing a lecture on unorthodox teas and on the same weekend that Pam read about beef tea in a fascinating article about retired Girl Scout badges.

A badge from the early twentieth century was for invalid cooking -- that is, the preparation of foods that would be easy to eat or restorative of health, for those unable to eat regular foods.

I am reminded of a hospital stay when I was ten years old, in which I rejected a nice plate of spaghetti and had nothing but creamed soups and Jello for the rest of a week. I am glad beef tea was out of favor by then!

People in the tea industry use "orthodox tea" to distinguish the products of Camelia sinensis from the tinctures of other plants, such as yerba maté and herbal teas. All of the candidates I knew about before this weekend are extracted from plants. I am very pleased to have learned of this seriously unorthodox exception.

When thinking about the term beef tea, both of us immediately thought it was just a funny way of saying broth, but this is not the case. As detailed in the Beef Tea recipe on epicurious, beef it cooked and then seeped and filtered. The beef itself is discarded just as tea leaves would be, and the bones are not present at all. As its presence on epicurious suggests, this is having a bit of a comeback. 

Perhaps it is not surprising that there are some particularly British ways of doing this, including a paste or fluid called Bovril and beef heart tea.