Season a round of beef with salt, pepper, cloves and nutmeg. Put in a saucepan on hot dripping. Peel 6 small onions and slice 2 carrots and 2 cloves of garlic. Add to the meat with 1 herb bouquet. Cover with 1 cup of hot water and let cook slowly until tender; then add ½ can of chopped mushrooms, 1 glass of claret, salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot on a border of mashed potatoes.
A plain braise with a Russian gloss: the technique is standard French pot-roasting, and the only real variables the original leaves open are the size of the beef and the length of the cooking. Both are worth pinning down before you start.
- The hinge: brown hard, then keep it barely tremblingThe single cup of water is not a poaching liquid, it is the start of a concentrated braise, so the meat must be deeply browned in the fat first or the finished sauce will taste thin and grey. Once the liquid goes in, hold it at a bare shiver — around 190-200F — rather than a boil, or the round will tighten and shred dry.
- A round of beefRead this as a piece of bottom or top round, tied. The original gives no weight; the single cup of water and handful of vegetables suggest something modest, perhaps 3-4 lb. Round is lean and needs the full braise: figure roughly 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer on the stovetop, until a skewer slides out with no resistance.
- Hot drippingRendered beef or pork fat kept from earlier roasts. Any neutral oil or clarified butter behaves the same way; you want about 2 tablespoons, hot enough to sizzle on contact.
- Herb bouquetA bouquet garni — parsley stems, a bay leaf and thyme, tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf so it can be fished out. Tie it to the pot handle and remove it before serving.
- A glass of claretClaret is red Bordeaux; a "glass" in period cookery writing is imprecise, commonly reckoned at around 2 fl oz, though larger readings appear. Any dry red works. Added at the end as written it stays sharp, so give it at least 10 minutes of simmering to lose the raw edge.
- Half a can of mushroomsCan sizes for mushrooms varied, so half a can is only approximate; treat it as a few ounces, drained. Fresh mushrooms, 6-8 oz sliced and browned separately in butter, give a far better result and should go in for the last 15 minutes.
- Two cloves of garlic, slicedSliced rather than crushed, and given three hours in liquid, the garlic dissolves into background sweetness. If you want it to register, add a second pair of cloves in the last half hour.
- The potato borderPipe or spoon stiff mashed potato around the rim of a warmed platter, slice the beef into the well and pour the reduced pan liquid over. If the sauce is loose, lift the meat out and boil it down by a third first.
- YieldA 3-4 lb round serves 6 to 8, and improves overnight — cool the beef in its liquid and slice it cold, then reheat the slices in the sauce.
The pattern here — beef, root vegetables, a bundle of herbs and a splash of red wine — is French braising method wearing a national label, which is exactly what a book like this trades in. Volumes of "dishes of all nations" were popular with American and British households in the early twentieth century, offering a different country each day as a solution to the daily problem of what to put on the table; the geography was usually loose and the technique usually the compiler's own. What marks this as nominally Russian is less the method than the mushrooms, which recall the mushroom-heavy cooking of the Russian table. Canned mushrooms, meanwhile, date the recipe as firmly as anything on the page — they were a mark of a well-stocked modern larder.