Pressed Beef
Take a shank of beef and two pigs feet, boil until tender, chop fine and season to taste with sage, salt and pepper, put in a deep dish to press. This is an excellent relish for breakfast or tea.
This is a jellied loaf in the head-cheese family: the pig's feet supply the gelatin that sets the shredded shank meat into a sliceable block. The recipe assumes you know that, so the two things it leaves out are the cooking liquid and the chilling.
- The hinge: keep the brothDo not drain the pot and discard the liquid. The collagen from the trotters is the setting agent, and it is worth moistening the packed meat with some of the strained, reduced cooking liquor before pressing; how much is a matter of taste, since pressing under weight also drives off surplus liquid.
- Cut and quantityA beef shank (foreshank or hind shank, bone in) with two split pig's trotters is the whole of it; the recipe gives no weights. A shank of roughly 3-4 lb will yield enough chopped meat for a loaf pan and several servings. Trotters are still sold, but usually need ordering from a butcher.
- "Boil until tender"Barely simmer, covered, for 3 to 4 hours, until the shank meat pulls from the bone and the trotters are gelatinous. A hard boil clouds the jelly and makes it grainy. Skim the scum in the first half hour.
- Chop fineChop the warm meat by hand rather than in a processor, which pastes it. Include the soft skin and connective tissue from the trotters chopped small; discard bones, gristle and any hard tendon.
- Season while warmSalt the meat and its liquid while both are hot and taste then, because a cold set jelly reads much blander. The recipe specifies only sage; dried sage is the likelier reading, and roughly a teaspoon per pound of meat is a starting point, with plenty of black pepper.
- "Put in a deep dish to press"Line a loaf pan with plastic wrap, pack the meat in firmly, lay a board or a second pan on top and weight it with a couple of tins. Chill for at least 8 hours, or overnight, and slice cold.
- Cooling and keepingThe larder this recipe assumes is where it quietly fails a modern kitchen. Get the loaf under refrigeration within two hours of cooking, keep it there, and eat it within about four days; it is a cooked meat in jelly and not a preserved one.
- ServingSlice thin and serve cold with mustard, pickles or vinegar. "Tea" here means a meal rather than the beverage -- in most households a light late-afternoon or evening one.
Pressed beef of this kind belongs to the long domestic tradition of setting cooked meat in its own gelatin, the same principle behind head cheese, brawn and jellied ox tongue, and it endured because it turned the cheapest cuts on the animal into something that could be sliced and carried to the table cold. The shank is nearly all working muscle and collagen, useless roasted and superb simmered; the pig's feet are added purely for setting power. The instruction to press it under a weight is what gives the dish its name and its close grain, and the note that it makes "an excellent relish for breakfast or tea" places it in a household where the cooked meat of one day was expected to reappear cold at the next two meals.