Oh my god I have it in my 1946 Lily Wallace New American Cookbook too I’m screaming
This is it! This is the white culture we’ve been looking for!
I’m sorry are we just not gonna mention “Beef Tea” “Raw Beef Tea” and “Cooked Raw Beef Tea” one after the other
#WHY
Because the majority of human existence has not been to the knowledge and supply level we are at now. You can’t just give someone electrolytes in the 19th century, you have no idea what the fuck they are. Someone is sick, and can only keep weak liquids down, but you know enough at this point to realise that man cannot live on water alone. So you work out really weird ways to infuse foodstuffs into liquids they can handle to try and keep food into them. A lot of these also come from a way to stretch nutrient sources in times of poverty and scarcity.
Thank you for this addition. People are curiously comfortable assuming everyone in the past was stupid and illogical, and it’s always struck me as showing a sad lack of empathy for fellow human beings. It’s like people in the past aren’t seen as, you know, people
Your local 19th century PhD researcher popping in here to add to this. Toast water is 100% a drink for treating illness. It turns up listed in several household medicine guides in the 19th century, and is listed as for treating people with fever, diarrhoea and vomiting, who can’t keep anything down. It’s essentially oral rehydration therapy.
It interestingly starts turning up in literature in the period covering five major cholera outbreaks in the UK and US (this was obviously an English language Ngram search).
And peaks several times at epidemic peak points (1830s, 1850, 1880s), including its first peak in 1831/2, which corresponds with the first cholera epidemic in the UK.
It also corresponds with the year William Brooke O’Shaughnessy discovered that a lot of people who were dying of cholera were severely lacking water and salts in their blood and urine. Dehydration was found to be a major cause of death in cholera patients. “Toast water” was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients.
Most of the recipes in household medicine guides I found suggest sweetening or flavouring the toast water with something if the patient could keep it down in order to cover the terrible taste.
People in the past were just people. And in this particular case, they were trying to keep their loved ones from dying of cholera.
And here is a link to possibly my fave ever book, with some modern recipes to do the same job , including the water you cooked rice in with the water you cooked rice in plus half a teaspoon of salt - so really toast water was pretty smart - https://en.hesperian.org/hhg/New_Where_There_Is_No_Doctor:Dehydration#Rehydration_drinks
