Season a piece of fat beef; put in a stew-pan with some hot water. Let cook slowly a half hour. Then add 3 potatoes, cut in dice pieces, and 1 onion, sliced. Let cook slowly until tender. Add ½ cup of corn and 1 cup of tomatoes; season with salt and pepper. Let all cook until done. Serve hot.
June 18 — No. 18
Irish
A one-pot stew written in the shorthand of a daily calendar cookbook, with no weights, no pan size and no total time. The proportions of vegetables tell you it was scaled for about four people.
- "A piece of fat beef"Read this as 1½ to 2 lb of a well-marbled braising cut — chuck, shin or short rib — cut into 1½-inch pieces. Genuinely ambiguous as written.
- The half hour is a start, not a finishThirty minutes of slow cooking will not tenderise a stewing cut. Give the meat 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer before the vegetables go in, then judge doneness by whether it yields to a fork.
- Brown firstThe original puts raw beef straight into hot water. Searing the seasoned meat in a little fat before adding liquid costs five minutes and is the difference between a stew and boiled beef in grey broth.
- Liquid level"Some hot water" is probably just enough to cover — roughly 2 to 3 cups for this quantity. Keep the pot barely covered as it reduces; the tomatoes later add more liquid.
- Vegetable timingDiced potato and sliced onion need 20 to 30 minutes, not the length of the whole braise, or they collapse into the broth. Add them once the meat is nearly tender.
- Corn and tomatoesCanned goods are the likely intention here, particularly for a dish dated in June. One cup of tomatoes is roughly 8 oz of canned tomatoes with their juice; the corn is probably drained kernels. They go in near the end and need only 10 minutes.
- Yield and servingServes two to four. Taste and season again once the tomatoes have cooked in.
Corn and tomatoes are what mark this as an American page rather than an Irish one. Traditional Irish stew is mutton or lamb with potato and onion and little else; beef, sweetcorn and canned tomatoes belong to the North American kitchen, where inexpensive canned vegetables were the everyday way to stretch a cheap cut. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each labelled with a nationality — had national labels that were often looser than the titles suggest, standing for a general idea (here, beef and potatoes cooked slowly in one pot) rather than a documented regional dish. The instruction to season the meat and cook it slowly in water before anything else is added is the older technique underneath the label.