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Veal, Lamb, or Beef
Cut the meat in pieces suitable for serving.
Put the sugar in a frying-pan, let it melt, and then add the onion, sliced, and the Snowdrift. Cook until the onion is soft, stirring occasionally, then add the meat, the boiling water and the seasonings.
Transfer to a casserole, cover closely and cook until the meat is tender, in a moderate oven, from 300 to 350 degrees F., about two hours. Then add the flour, which has been dissolved in the milk or tomato, let cook a little longer to become thick again, serve with mashed potatoes, or with boiled brown, or uncoated rice.
The milk is especially good with the veal or lamb; tomato may be used with any one of the three meats.
If desired, a fourth cupful of uncoated, raw rice may be sprinkled in between the layers of meat; it will thicken the dish, the addition of flour will be unnecessary.
A straightforward braise, but the page as printed carries only the method — the ingredient quantities that would have headed it are missing, so treat the amounts below as reconstruction from the proportions the text implies.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, the product this book was written to promote. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works: about 2 tablespoons for 2 lb of meat.
- Missing quantitiesFor roughly 2 lb of cubed shoulder veal, lamb or chuck: 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 large onion, 2 tablespoons fat, 1 cup boiling water, salt and pepper, then 2 tablespoons flour slaked in 1/2 cup milk or tomato. Serves four to five.
- The sugar step is the hingeThe sugar goes into the pan before the onion and fat, and melting it first is what gives the gravy its brown tone. The text says only to let it melt, so stop at a light caramel — burnt sugar turns the whole dish bitter, and there is no rescuing it.
- "Casserole" hereIn period usage this means a lidded, ovenproof pot — a Dutch oven does the job. You can skip the transfer entirely and braise in the frying pan if it has a tight lid and an ovenproof handle.
- OvenThe book gives its own numbers, 300–350°F. Stay at the low end for lamb and veal shoulder; two hours covered is about right for 1½-inch cubes.
- Thickening with milkAdd the milk-and-flour slurry off the boil and stir it in steadily, then return to a bare simmer. Dairy dropped into a hot acidic or salty braise and then boiled hard will curdle.
- The rice variation"Uncoated" rice means rice not polished and dusted with talc or glucose, as much white rice then was — ordinary long-grain rice today is uncoated. If you layer 1/4 cup raw rice through the meat, keep the liquid at a full cup or more, since the rice will drink most of it.
- Browning the meatThe original never sears the meat, only the sugar and onion. Browning the cubes first in the fat and setting them aside costs ten minutes and noticeably improves the gravy.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1890s through the 1920s: the manufacturer's cookbook, issued free or for a few cents to teach cooks how to use a new industrial product. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and books like this one existed to argue that it could stand in for lard and butter in every branch of cookery, a claim not tested here at all, since nothing about the dish requires a special fat. The recipe itself is essentially a household-scale ragoût, the caramel-and-onion base a thrift technique for colouring gravy without commercial browning sauces. Its willingness to treat veal, lamb and beef as interchangeable, and to offer milk or tomato as the finishing liquid, reflects the era's shift toward recipes framed as adaptable formulas rather than fixed dishes — a style pushed hard by the domestic science movement and eagerly adopted by the food companies that sponsored it.