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BEEF, BRAISED, RUMP (a la Jardiniere)
Remove the bone from a piece of rump weighing about sixteen pounds, and trim and tie it into a nice shape. Simmer it for three hours in the stock-pot, and after well draining put it into a braising-pan or stew-pan, with a gravy made in the following manner. Put three carrots, three onions, three shallots, three bay-leaves, and a sprig of thyme into a stewpan with a pint and a half of good rich gravy. Slice the vegetables and simmer until the flavour is extracted and the gravy reduced to about one pint, then strain and add the best part of a pint of Marsala. Pour this gravy over the meat in the braising-pan, simmer and baste constantly for two hours. Add half a pint of Spanish sauce (see SPANISH SAUCE); skim and strain into a tureen to be served with the beef. Garnish with brussels sprouts, carrots, and cauliflowers; the latter is best placed at the ends and sides of the dish, with carrots on each side of the cauliflowers and the brussels sprouts to fill up the spaces between. Time to simmer, three hours; to braise, two hours. Probable cost, 11d. to 1s. per pound. Sufficient for a remove.
A Victorian banquet joint, written for a kitchen with a permanent stock-pot and a dining room expecting a centrepiece. The method is sound; the scale is the problem.
- Sixteen pounds is a partyA boned rump of that size feeds thirty or more. A 4-5 lb boned, rolled piece of rump or top rump behaves the same way; keep the proportions of gravy and wine roughly to weight, and cut the simmering to about an hour and the braise to two.
- "Sufficient for a remove"A remove was the large joint that replaced the soup or fish course at a formal dinner, not a portion count. Read it as the main dish for the whole table.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: a brown roux built on rich veal or beef stock with aromatic vegetables, simmered and skimmed at length; Victorian versions vary in whether tomato appears. Half a pint is the finishing enrichment for the braising liquor. A well-reduced, lightly thickened brown stock stands in for it.
- "Good rich gravy"Not pan drippings. Here it points to a concentrated brown stock rather than a thickened sauce. Unsalted beef stock reduced by half gives roughly the right body.
- MarsalaUse a dry Marsala, not the sweet cooking variety sold in supermarkets, or the finished sauce turns cloying against the reduced stock. Madeira is a common substitute.
- Oven rather than hobThe two-hour braise is easier in a covered pot at 300-325F than on a burner, and it removes the need for constant basting. Turn the joint once or twice; the liquid should never go above a bare tremble or the meat tightens.
- The two-stage cookingThe initial simmer in the stock-pot is a blanch-and-cook that leaves the joint pale; the braise supplies colour and flavour. If you skip straight to braising, brown the meat well first or the finished joint looks grey.
- A la jardiniereThe garnish vegetables are cooked separately and arranged around the dish, not braised with the beef. Cook them just to tender and dress them with butter so they hold their colour against the dark sauce.
- The costing11d. to 1s. per pound is Victorian money, near enough a shilling a pound for rump. It tells you this was a good but not extravagant cut in a house that could afford sixteen pounds of it at once.
Braising a large joint a la jardiniere — conventionally glossed as "in the gardener's style," the name attached to a garnish of fresh vegetables — belongs to the French-influenced service of nineteenth-century English upper-middle-class dining. The dish demonstrates the full grammar of a braise: a boned and tied joint, an aromatic reduction, a fortified wine, and a mother sauce added at the end rather than at the beginning. The instruction to place cauliflowers at the ends and sides with carrots flanking them and sprouts filling the gaps is not fussiness but the logic of a dish carried whole to the table and carved before guests, where the arrangement had to survive the journey and look deliberate from every seat. That a household might simmer sixteen pounds of rump for three hours in an already-simmering stock-pot says a good deal about the kitchens the book was written for.