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Beef, Braised, Rump, with Macaroni
Cook the beef as before directed, and boil some blanched macaroni in veal broth. Drain it, and add some Spanish sauce and grated Parmesan cheese. Mix well and serve round the meat. Tomato sauce may be sent to table in a tureen. Time to boil the macaroni from fifteen to twenty minutes.
A short cross-reference entry: the beef itself is braised by the method given earlier in the book, and what follows is only the garnish. Treat it as a serving idea for a braised rump rather than a standalone recipe.
- "As before directed"The braising instructions live in the preceding entries, not here.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: the brown mother sauce, built on a dark roux, brown stock and mirepoix, long-simmered and strained. A well-reduced brown gravy from the braising liquid, skimmed of fat, does the same job here.
- Blanched macaroniVictorian recipes often gave macaroni a preliminary boil in water before finishing it in broth. With modern dried pasta the extra step is unnecessary; cook it once, in the veal broth.
- Macaroni timingFifteen to twenty minutes reflects the thick, coarse dried macaroni of the day, and would reduce most current pasta to mush. Cook to the packet time, a minute short of done, since it goes on to sit in hot sauce.
- Veal brothA pale, gelatinous unsalted stock. Chicken stock is the closest supermarket substitute; avoid anything heavily seasoned, as the espagnole and Parmesan both bring salt.
- ParmesanGrate it fine and stir it in off the heat, after the sauce has stopped boiling, so it melts rather than tightening into strings.
- Tomato sauce in a tureenSent separately so diners can add it to the macaroni at will. A plain cooked tomato sauce rather than a modern jarred pasta sauce.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given, as was normal for a garnish entry. Around 8 oz dried macaroni, a pint of sauce and 3 oz Parmesan will ring a joint serving six to eight.
Cassell's belonged to the era when English cookery had thoroughly absorbed the French repertoire, and this entry shows it: a plain British rump of beef, braised, dressed with sauce espagnole and finished with Parmesan in the Italian manner. Macaroni had been familiar in British kitchens since the eighteenth century -- it is often credited to returning Grand Tourists, though that is a repeated tradition rather than a documented route -- and by the later nineteenth century it was a cheap, respectable pantry staple rather than an exotic import. Entries like this one are deliberately telegraphic; the dictionary format assumed a cook would already have read the braising method given in the preceding entries, and the compilers used the space to record variations rather than repeat instructions. The tomato sauce sent round separately in a tureen is a period marker in itself, tomato still being treated as an optional accent rather than the base of the dish.