Boil beef brisket until tender, and slice thin. Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add 1 chopped onion. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown. Add the water in which the meat was cooked, ½ cup of raisins, ½ cup of vinegar, 1 tablespoonful of brown sugar and some cinnamon and 1 carrot sliced thin, salt, pepper and a few cloves. Let boil. Add the brisket and simmer fifteen minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A sweet-and-sour brisket in the German-Jewish manner, built as two operations: boil the meat, then finish it in a raisin-vinegar gravy. The recipe gives no weights, so treat the ratios as a sauce for a 3-4 lb flat-cut brisket.
- Boiling the brisket"Until tender" means 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer for a 3-4 lb flat cut, covered with water. A hard boil tightens the muscle and dries it out; keep the surface barely moving and skim the scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Slice cold, serve hotBrisket sliced straight off the heat shreds. Let it cool in its broth at least 30 minutes, or refrigerate overnight, then slice thin across the grain and reheat in the sauce as directed.
- The butter is not kosherDespite the title, cooking beef in butter breaks the separation of meat and dairy. An observant kitchen would have used schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) or oil in place of the butter; the butter here suggests the recipe as printed was not written for one.
- Vinegar quantityHalf a cup of vinegar against a single tablespoon of brown sugar makes a decidedly sour sauce. If you want it milder, start with a third of a cup of 5% cider or distilled vinegar, taste against the sugar, and adjust.
- The rouxOne tablespoon of flour to two of fat browned with the onion gives a light gravy, not a thick one. Add the cooking liquid gradually and whisk as you go to keep it smooth.
- Whole cloves and cinnamon"A few cloves" means three or four whole ones, fished out before serving, and a cinnamon stick or a scant quarter teaspoon of ground. The spicing should be detectable, not dominant.
- Fifteen minutes is a minimumThe simmer is only there to marry the sliced meat with the sauce. If the brisket came out less than fully tender, keep it in the covered sauce over low heat for 30-45 minutes instead, adding broth as it reduces.
- YieldA 3-4 lb brisket with this sauce serves six to eight. Leftovers slice cleanly cold, and the original allows either temperature.
Sweet-and-sour braised beef with raisins, vinegar and brown sugar is the Ashkenazi dish usually anglicised as "sweet and sour brisket" and known in Yiddish-speaking kitchens under names built on essig (vinegar); it is often compared to the German Sauerbraten tradition. Brisket became the festival cut for reasons of kosher butchery as much as taste: it comes from the forequarter, the portion permitted without the difficult removal of the sciatic nerve, and it was cheap, which mattered. Its appearance here, in a book that assigns one nation to each day of the year, sits alongside its "Hungarian" and "Japanese" entries — and the butter in the gravy suggests the compiler was not working from an observant kitchen.