Braised Beef
Select five pounds of beef from the round or rump. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dredge with flour. Brown richly in a hot frying-pan in some of its own fat; or with fat salt pork tried out, turning often. Place meat in a Dutch oven or an earthen casserole on three thin slices of salt pork, surround with two-thirds cup each of fat salt pork cut in small cubes, carrot, onion and celery, a spray each of parsley, thyme and marjoram. Add two cups Brown Stock or water, the half of a small bay leaf, two small red pepper-pods, or one-half teaspoon pepper-corns, four cloves. Sprinkle all with salt and strew top of meat with cubes of salt pork. Cover closely and cook in a slow oven from four to five hours, basting occasionally. Remove meat and strain the liquor. Rinse the vessel in which meat was browned with stock or water, reserve the liquor. Prepare a Brown Sauce with this liquor following recipe for Plain Brown Sauce (see Page 82).
Serve in a sauce-boat, or turn around meat after placing on hot serving platter. A cup of hot, stewed and strained tomatoes may be added to the sauce, also one and one-half tablespoons of freshly grated horseradish root and one tablespoon of Worcestershire Sauce; all of which improves the flavor.
A classic pot roast built on salt pork and a long, low oven. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the instructions assume equipment and ingredients that have shifted since 1913.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" in period usage means roughly 250-325F; somewhere around 300F suits four to five hours on five pounds of beef. Anything hotter and the liquid boils rather than trembles, which squeezes the meat dry before the connective tissue has time to melt.
- The hinge: keep the liquid below a simmerTwo cups of stock under a five-pound roast is a braise, not a boil, and the lid must actually seal. If your Dutch oven lid is loose, lay a sheet of foil or parchment over the pot before the lid goes on.
- "Casserole" here means the potIn this period an earthen casserole is a lidded earthenware braising vessel used on the range or in the oven, not the shallow baking dish the word means now. A heavy enamelled cast-iron Dutch oven is the direct modern equivalent.
- Salt pork and saltingFat salt pork is cured, unsmoked pork belly or fatback, sold at some butchers; unsmoked pancetta or blanched fatback substitutes well. Between the slices beneath, the cubes around and the cubes strewn on top, the dish carries a great deal of salt already, so go very light on the salt sprinkled over the vegetables and consider an unsalted or low-sodium stock.
- "Tried out"To try out salt pork is to render it slowly over moderate heat until the fat runs and the scraps are golden. Use that fat to brown the beef; the cracklings can go into the pot with the cubes.
- Cut of beefRound is lean and will slice neatly but can come out dry; rump, chuck or a boneless bottom-round roast tied into an even cylinder gives a better result over five hours. Tie it whatever the cut, or it will slump and cook unevenly.
- Red pepper-podsThese are small dried hot chilies of the cayenne type. Two of them in a pot this size is background warmth, not heat; the peppercorn alternative given is the milder choice.
- Deglazing"Rinse the vessel in which meat was browned with stock or water" means deglaze the frying pan, scraping up the browned fond, and add that to the strained braising liquor before making the brown sauce.
- YieldFive pounds of raw beef serves eight to ten with a starch and a vegetable, and reheats well in its sauce. Let the meat rest fifteen minutes before slicing, against the grain.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of American cookbooks organised around the weekly menu rather than the ingredient, and a five-pound braise is exactly the sort of dish that genre was built for: it feeds a table, it holds in a slow oven, and it improves while it waits. The method itself is French in ancestry — the bed of pork slices, the aromatic vegetables cut small, the bouquet of parsley, thyme and bay, the strained liquor turned into a brown sauce — and reflects how thoroughly professional French technique had been absorbed into American middle-class cookery by the 1910s, largely through the cooking-school movement. The salt pork, though, is native habit: before home refrigeration was common, cured fatback was the year-round cooking fat and seasoning of the American kitchen. The closing suggestion of tomato, horseradish and Worcestershire draws on the bottled sauces that were by then a familiar presence in printed recipes on both sides of the Atlantic.