Beef-tea is a light and pleasant article of diet, obtained from the flesh of the ox. It is best made as follows: A pound of lean beef is cut into small pieces and placed in a closed jar with a pint of cold water; after an hour the jar is allowed to stand for another hour in a pan of gently boiling water; the contents are then strained through a coarse sieve. A much more concentrated beef-tea may be made by placing the meat in a jar without water and simmering it as above for two or three hours. Salt is then added according to taste. Either of these processes removes from the meat almost all its salts and extractive matters, with a proportion of its albumen and gelatine.
Beef-tea is popularly supposed to contain all the nourishment of the meat from which it is made. This is a great mistake; for though the substances which give the beef its flavour are extracted, far the larger part of the nutritious albumen and gelatine remain in the tasteless and hardly digestible residue: more complex processes are required to obtain highly nutritious extracts from meat. It is, however, of great value in the treatment of invalids, for the nutritious elements which it does contain are, so far as they go, in a digestible form; it is, moreover, a pleasant stimulant, a relish which may enable a sick person with poor appetite to eat other food with enjoyment, and a suitable vehicle for the administration of more nutritious material, for example, some of the easily absorbed 'peptones' or 'infants' foods' in the market. It must always be borne in mind that beef-tea alone has not a high value as a food, and that the increased sense of strength and well-being often following its administration is due to a stimulating more than to a nourishing effect, and is therefore transient and sometimes harmful. Moreover, in some diseases, particularly gout and kidney-disease, it is usually injurious. Mutton, treated in a similar manner, yields a broth or tea which is not so easily digested, and is hurtful to persons of weak stomach, especially if the fat be not skimmed off from the liquid. A knuckle of veal affords a similar broth or tea; but it is not so light as beef-tea, and, moreover, gelatinises on cooling. A broth or tea prepared from a young chicken is, of all decoctions of animal matter, the most readily digested, and is specially suitable for invalids, where great irritability of the stomach exists.