Bouilli Beef
Get a piece of the rump, from twelve to thirteen pounds; let the butcher take out the bone and have an onion inserted; rub it all over with different spices; let it stand for a couple of days to become tender. Remove the onion when you put it over to boil; skim carefully all grease that will rise to the top. It must boil slowly for three or four hours. Add about six or eight cloves, two blades of mace, a few celery tops; in about two hours before dinner add two carrots, cut in thin, round slices, one onion, some allspice, whole peppers. Short time before serving, take out about a pint of the gravy-add to it the same quantity of claret wine; thicken with some browned flour, adding a few capers; pour over the beef and serve. -Mrs. C. Hamilton.
A large boiled rump in the French manner, spiced ahead and finished with a claret sauce. Everything about it is scaled to a Victorian dinner table, so the first decisions are size and heat.
- Scale it downTwelve to thirteen pounds of boned rump will feed twenty or more. A 4-5 lb piece behaves the same way; keep the aromatics roughly proportional and shorten the simmer accordingly.
- The two-day restThis is a dry spice rub and a rest, not a cure — there is no measured salt or nitrite. Do it in the refrigerator, uncovered or loosely covered, and treat two days as the limit. The old instruction assumed a cold larder in winter.
- "Boil slowly" means simmerThe hinge of the dish. Hold the water at 180-190F, with the surface barely trembling. A true rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy beef in a cloudy broth.
- TimingThree to four hours is optimistic for thirteen pounds; a rump that size often wants five or more. Go by feel — a skewer should slide in with almost no resistance — rather than the clock.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece. If you are substituting ground mace, equivalences vary — start with about a quarter teaspoon for two blades and add it toward the end rather than at the beginning.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until it is the colour of light brown sugar. It thickens less than raw flour, so allow about half again as much, and it contributes much of the sauce's colour and a nutty flavour.
- ClaretNineteenth-century American usage for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red works; equal parts wine and hot broth is a lot of raw alcohol, so let the sauce simmer a few minutes before the capers go in.
- The onion in the bone cavityIt perfumes the interior during the resting days and is discarded before cooking. Skip it if your butcher gives you a rolled and tied piece rather than a hollow one.
- SkimmingSkim in the first twenty minutes, while the grey protein foam is still rising, and again as fat gathers. Broth skimmed early stays clear and is worth keeping for soup.
Bouilli is simply the French past participle of bouillir, to boil — the meat lifted out of the pot in a pot-au-feu, served as a course in its own right with the broth taken separately. It appears in American cookbooks, and by the late nineteenth century a boiled rump with a spiced wine sauce was a standard way to put a large, cheap, hard-working cut on a dinner table with some ceremony. The word is generally credited as the source of British army slang "bully beef" for tinned boiled beef. The attribution to Mrs. C. Hamilton is typical of the period's community cookbooks, which gathered contributions by name from subscribers and church members.