💊 Doctor's Orders 1904

Raw Beef Soup

Chipped raw beef and four drops of hydrochloric acid, iced twelve hours, strained and drunk cold.

From: Cooking in Old Créole Days
Published: 1904
Yikes Scale: Call poison control

Exactly as printed, 1904

One pound of chipped beef. Put into a preserve jar with four ounces of water and four drops of muriatic acid poured over it. Put the top down tight, shake, and put on the ice for twelve hours, then put the jar into a pan of cold water (bain-Marie) and put it on the fire for an hour until the water is hot, then strain the contents of the jar off with pressure through a cloth, and put it on the ice until it is cold. Take it off the ice and let it stand ten minutes before serving. Salt to taste.

From page 12 of the 1904 edition.

Cooking in Old Créole Days, 1904. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

The acid is a digestion theory, not a preservative. The idea was to pre-digest the meat outside the body so an invalid could absorb it, and four drops in four ounces does not make the jar safe.

It is warmed in a bain-marie for an hour, which sounds like cooking and is not. The temperature never approaches anything that would make raw beef safe, and it is then chilled and drunk.

Notes from the 21st century

Muriatic acid is hydrochloric acid. The commercial grade, then and now. Household muriatic acid today is a masonry cleaner and carries contaminants never intended for food.
“Beef tea” was medicine, not soup. The whole genre — raw beef teas, beef juices, meat pulps — was fed to the seriously ill on the belief it delivered concentrated nourishment. It does not; it is mostly water and gelatine.
Served to the people least able to cope. The recipe sits in an invalid-cookery context. Raw beef is at its most dangerous for exactly that group.

Also in this book

Brisket of Beef — One pound of salt to two pounds of saltpetre — twice as much nitrate as salt.

Don't take our word for it. The complete book is online, free and searchable.

Read the original page →

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