fit to feed to invalids

It was common practice, at the end of the nineteenth century, to serve “beef-tea” (similar to beef broth) to invalids. Estelle Woods Wilcox's 1877 Buckeye Cooking and Practical Housekeeping contains recipes for “beef-tea” and for rendering “raw meat palatable to invalids.” Sarah Josepha Hale, in The Good Housekeeper, Or the Way to Live Well, and to be Well While We Live (1839) provides a recipe for “chicken tea” as well as “beef tea” as part of her suggested “cookery for the sick” (128). An article published in 1889 in The British Medical Journal promotes a meat diet in contrast to “beef-tea” as a way to provide better nutrition to “invalids” while avoiding waste of beef products.