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BREAKFAST STEW
Cut three-fourths of a pound of cold roast beef into small pieces, heat slowly with half a pint cold water, one table-spoon Chilisauce, a tea-spoon salt, and half a tea-spoon pepper. Rub two table-spoons flour with some butter and a little of the hot gravy, add to the beef, let cook until the flour is done, and then serve with bits of dry toast. Slices of onions may be first cooked and the meat added to them, with or without Chili-sauce.
A leftovers dish from the "Fragments" chapter, built to stretch the Sunday roast into Monday breakfast. It comes together in about fifteen minutes on the stovetop.
- Half a pintOne cup of water. With three-quarters of a pound of meat that gives a thin gravy, which is the point — this is meant to soak into toast rather than coat the beef.
- Chili-sauceIn 1877 this meant a homemade tomato relish, closer to a chunky ketchup with onion, vinegar and spice than to a hot sauce. A tablespoon of tomato-based chili sauce or ketchup with a splash of vinegar reads correctly; sriracha does not.
- The hinge is low heat"Heat slowly" is the whole instruction. Already-cooked beef toughens and dries if it simmers hard; keep the pan barely trembling and pull it as soon as the gravy thickens.
- Rubbing flour with butterA thickening paste of flour and butter, here slackened with a little of the hot gravy before it goes in. The recipe says only "some butter," so the quantity is left to the cook. Work it in off the boil to avoid lumps.
- "Until the flour is done"Three to five minutes of gentle cooking, enough to lose the raw-starch taste. It is a texture and smell cue, not a browning one — the gravy should look glossy rather than cloudy.
- The onion variationSlice one medium onion and cook it soft in butter or beef drippings first, ten minutes or so, before adding the water and meat. This is the better version if the roast was lean or bland.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted leftovers and no commercial stock. Season at the end instead, since chili sauce and the roast's own seasoning both carry salt.
- YieldTwo generous breakfast portions, or three with plenty of toast. Dry toast means plain and crisp, unbuttered; the recipe says only to serve the stew with bits of it and does not specify how the toast is cut or arranged.
Buckeye Cookery devotes a whole section to "Fragments," and the placement tells you as much as the recipe does: in a nineteenth-century household with limited cold storage and a large joint of meat to get through, making use of leftovers was part of the cook's skill. Cold roast beef reheated in a thickened gravy appears across English and American books of the era under many names -- hashed beef, minced beef, beef stew for breakfast -- and the meat course at breakfast was still ordinary in American middle-class homes of the 1870s. The chili sauce is the period detail worth noticing: bottled and home-put-up tomato sauces spread in the decades after the Civil War, and here one is used much as we would use a squeeze of ketchup, to give reheated meat back some brightness and acidity.