Braised Beef
Take six or eight pounds of round or a piece of the rump. Lard with salt pork. Put a few slices of pork in the braising pan ; when the pork begins to fry, add two onions, two slices carrot, half a turnip, all minced or chopped fine. As soon as they begin to brown nicely, draw to one side of the pan, and put in your beef. Dredge well with pepper, salt and flour. Brown the meat well on all sides, then add one quart of boiling water and a small bunch of sweet herbs. Cover the pan and cook slowly three and a half hours. Baste often; take up and add to the gravy half can of tomatoes and cook ten minutes. Strain, pour around beef and serve
A straightforward pot roast in the French style, written for a coal range but perfectly at home in a modern Dutch oven. The main adjustments are the size of the joint and the heat source.
- The cutSix to eight pounds of beef round or rump is a large joint by modern standards and will need a 7- to 9-quart Dutch oven or covered roaster. A 3-4 lb piece works the same way; keep the liquid at roughly half depth up the meat and shorten the cooking to about two hours.
- LardingTo lard is to thread strips of salt pork through the lean meat with a larding needle, which top round genuinely needs since it has almost no internal fat. A larding needle is now a specialty tool; if you skip the step, use a fattier cut such as chuck or brisket rather than leaving round bare.
- "Cook slowly"The recipe is a covered pan on the range, and on a stovetop this means the barest tremble, not a rolling simmer. If you move it to the oven instead, something in the range of 300-325F will hold that pace; three and a half hours suits a joint of this size, and the meat is done when a fork goes in with no resistance rather than at a particular internal temperature.
- Browning is the pointThe colour on the meat and on the minced vegetables is where the whole flavour of the gravy comes from. Get the pork fat properly hot, dry the beef before it goes in, and do not crowd it or move it too early.
- Sweet herbsA period term for aromatic herbs such as thyme, marjoram, savory and parsley, here tied in a small bunch much as a bouquet garni would be. Tie it so you can pull it out before straining.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period came in more than one size, commonly somewhere between a pint and a quart, so half a can is roughly a cup to a pint of tomatoes with their juice. Ten minutes is enough to soften them before straining.
- The gravyStraining is what turns the mixture into a sauce; the vegetables have given everything they have and are meant to be discarded. If the liquid is thin after straining, reduce it hard for a few minutes rather than adding more flour.
- BastingOnly necessary if the pot lid does not seal well. With a heavy modern lid the joint self-bastes, and lifting it every twenty minutes just costs you heat and liquid.
- YieldEight pounds of beef serves twelve to sixteen, and the dish is better on the second day, when the meat can be sliced cold and reheated in its strained gravy.
Braising as a named technique came into American household books through French cooking, where a braisi e was a lidded pan with a recessed lid meant to hold hot coals so the meat cooked from above and below. By the time this book was printed the coals were gone and "braising pan" simply meant a heavy covered pot, but the method survived intact: fat, aromatic vegetables cut fine, a hard sear, a small quantity of liquid, and long slow heat. The recipe is a good index of what an American kitchen expected of itself, a joint large enough to feed a household and its leftovers, salt pork standing in for the fat that lean domestic beef lacked, and a half-can of tomatoes at the end.