Spiced Beef
Four to six pounds from the middle cut of the shin. Wash the meat on the outside and cut off any part of the skin which is not sweet and clean. Pick off all the fine fragments of bone. Cut the meat into several pieces ; cover with boiling water. Skim carefully as it boils and then simmer until the meat falls to pieces and the liquor is reduced to half a pint. Remove the meat; season the liquor highly with salt, pepper, sage and thyme, add it to the meat, and mix with the fork until the meat is all broken. Pack in a pan. When cold, cut in thin slices.
This is a pressed or potted beef loaf, set by its own gelatin rather than by any added binder. Everything depends on cooking the shin long enough that the connective tissue dissolves and the reduced liquor will jelly when cold.
- The cutMiddle cut of the shin is beef shank, sold today as shank cross-cuts or osso buco-style slices, bone in. It is the right choice because it is dense with collagen; a leaner cut will not set. Ask for the bones if the butcher removes them and cook them alongside.
- The hinge: reduce, don't diluteThe finished liquor must come down to about half a pint (one cup) for 4-6 lb of meat. That concentration is what makes the loaf sliceable. Start with barely enough boiling water to cover, keep the pot at a bare tremble, and if the meat collapses before the liquid is reduced, lift it out and boil the broth down hard on its own.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time; allow several hours of simmering, probably four or more, and longer for the full 6 lb, with extra time if the liquor has not yet reduced. "Falls to pieces" is literal: the meat should shred against a fork with no resistance.
- SkimmingThe grey scum that rises in the first ten minutes is coagulated protein and should come off, but stop once the surface clears. Skimming the fat off the reduced liquor at the end is optional; a little fat gives a smoother slice.
- Seasoning"Season highly" is not a flourish. Cold meat mutes salt and herbs considerably, so taste the hot liquor and push it further than seems right. For 5 lb of meat, start with about 2 teaspoons salt, a teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon each of dried sage and thyme, then adjust.
- The panAny straight-sided dish will do; a loaf tin gives the neatest slices. Pack the mixture down firmly to drive out air pockets, cover with parchment or foil, and weight it with a second tin and a couple of cans. Chill overnight.
- Storage and yieldThe original assumes a cold larder. Refrigerate it, and treat it as you would any cooked meat: four days at most, or slice and freeze. Depending on how much bone is in the cut, four to six pounds of bone-in shin should give somewhere in the region of one and a half to two and a half pounds of loaf, enough for eight to twelve as a cold cut.
- ServingSlice thin with a sharp knife straight from the refrigerator, while the gelatin is firm. Traditional accompaniments are mustard, pickles or a sharp chutney and brown bread.
Pressed and potted meats were the standard nineteenth-century answer to the problem of the cheap, tough, gelatin-rich cut: cook it to collapse, concentrate the broth, and let it set into something that slices cleanly and keeps for several days in a cold larder. This version is closer to a jellied loaf than to the older spiced beef of the British Isles, which is a whole joint dry-cured with saltpetre and spices over a week or more and associated particularly with Christmas in Ireland; how the name came to be attached to a much quicker preparation seasoned simply with sage, thyme and pepper is not clear. Household cookbooks of the period do carry such dishes, and it is easy to see why: a shin bought whole was among the cheapest meat in the shop, and a cold sliceable loaf answered the daily question of what to put on the supper or luncheon table without lighting the range again.