Boiled Beef
Have five pounds of beef, cut from the face of the rump. Wipe meat, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and dredge with flour. Brown richly in an iron skillet in some of its own fat tried out, turning often. Remove to kettle and cover with boiling water. Add one tablespoon salt, one-half teaspoon peppercorns, a bit of bay leaf, one carrot sliced, one turnip sliced, and one-half onion sliced. Add two sprays each of parsley and thyme and one of marjoram. Cover and heat to boiling point. Skim when necessary. Reduce heat and simmer until meat is tender (four or five hours). Remove to serving platter. Strain stock and use for soup or sauces. Serve meat with hot Horseradish Sauce. (For recipe see page 51.)
A plain braise-and-boil of a large beef roast, and the method still works exactly as written. Two details deserve attention: the cut and the meaning of "simmer."
- "Face of the rump"An old butcher's term for the flat, lean outer face of the rump section. Ask for a bottom round or rump roast, or use a 5 lb chuck roast, which has more connective tissue and comes out juicier after long cooking.
- "Its own fat tried out"Trim the fat cap off, dice it, and render it in the skillet over moderate heat until you have a few tablespoons of liquid fat, then discard the cracklings and brown the meat in it. Any neutral oil or beef tallow does the same job.
- Keep it below a boilThis is the hinge. Bring it up to boiling once to raise the scum, then hold the pot at 180-190F, where the surface barely trembles. A real rolling boil for four hours squeezes the muscle fibres tight and gives you dry, stringy beef in a cloudy broth.
- TimingFour to five hours is right for a 5 lb piece of bottom round held at a bare simmer. Test with a skewer rather than the clock: it should slide in and out with no resistance.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in what will be several quarts of water is a light hand by modern standards, and much of it ends up in the stock. Taste the liquid after an hour and adjust; you want it pleasant to drink, not just to cook in.
- SkimmingThe grey foam that rises in the first fifteen minutes is coagulated protein. Lift it off with a slotted spoon and you get a clear stock worth keeping; leave it and the broth turns muddy.
- Slicing and servingLet the meat sit ten minutes, then carve across the grain in thin slices. Five pounds serves eight to ten, and the strained stock, chilled overnight so the fat lifts off in a cap, is the real second dividend.
- The vegetables in the potThe carrot, turnip and onion here are aromatics, and after five hours they are spent. If you want vegetables to eat, add fresh ones in the last 30-40 minutes.
Boiled beef was a mainstay of the English and American table because it fed a crowd from a cheap cut and produced a second meal, the soup, from the same fire. What is notable in this version is the browning step, since the older instruction had simply been to plunge the joint into water. The horseradish sauce is the traditional partner, generally traced to the northern European habit of serving grated horseradish with plainly cooked beef, and it survives in Britain's roast beef service to this day. Books like this one, which planned a year of Sunday dinners in advance, favoured such dishes precisely because a large joint could be started in the morning and left largely alone.