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Beef, Breslau
Take three or four ounces of bread-crumbs, beat up three eggs and add them to the crumbs and a small cupful of good brown gravy; break three ounces of butter into small pieces, and mix all together with half a tea-spoonful of salt, one tea-spoonful of grated lemon-peel, two table-spoonfuls of minced thyme and parsley, and a little cayenne. When these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, take of roast beef, rather undercooked, from a half to three-quarters of a pound, mince it very finely, mix well with the forcemeat, and bake for half an hour in buttered coffee-cups. Turn out, and serve with egg-balls round the dish and gravy if liked. Probable cost, exclusive of meat, 8d. Sufficient for a small dish.
A Victorian way of turning Sunday's leftover roast into a second dinner, baked in small moulds. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the instructions assume a kitchen that no longer exists.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book leaves the heat to the cook's judgement. Half an hour in buttered cups suits a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F, with the cups stood on a baking sheet.
- Coffee-cups as mouldsA Victorian coffee cup was small, on the order of 3 to 5 fl oz, and smaller than a modern breakfast cup. Dariole moulds, small ramekins or a muffin tin of the same capacity do the same job; butter them heavily or the mixture will not turn out clean.
- The meat must be undercookedThis is the hinge. The beef is minced raw-ish in the centre and then baked again for half an hour, so meat already roasted through will come out dry and grey. Rare or pink roast beef, chilled before mincing, gives a moist result.
- Mince, not process"Mince it very finely" means chopped or run through a mincer, giving distinct shreds. A food processor turns cold beef to paste and the texture collapses into a solid block.
- HerbsTwo tablespoons of minced thyme and parsley together indicates fresh herbs. The recipe does not give the proportion between them, though parsley would plausibly dominate with thyme as the accent. Two tablespoons of dried thyme would be inedible.
- Brown gravyA small cupful, about 4 fl oz, of proper roast-meat gravy or a well-reduced beef stock. It is doing the work of binding and seasoning, so a thin or bland stock leaves the mixture flat.
- Egg-ballsA garnish that has all but vanished: hard-boiled yolks pounded smooth with a little raw yolk and flour, rolled into marbles and simmered or fried firm. Quartered hard-boiled eggs around the dish are the usual modern substitute.
- YieldHalf to three-quarters of a pound of beef with three eggs and the crumbs fills about six small cups. "Sufficient for a small dish" means a light supper for three or four, not a main course for six.
- CostEightpence, exclusive of the meat, is the giveaway that this was a thrift recipe; the beef was already paid for on Sunday.
Breslau — the Prussian city that is now Wrocław in Poland — attaches in Cassell's to a baked mince of cold beef bound with crumbs, eggs and butter. The connection to Silesia is decorative rather than documented: nineteenth-century English cookery books freely borrowed continental place names to dignify made dishes, much as a hash could become a salmi or a rissole a croquette. What the recipe really records is the economics of the Victorian middle-class household, where a large joint was roasted at the start of the week and the cook was expected to disguise it convincingly for several days afterwards. Baking the mixture in coffee-cups and turning it out gave the leftovers the shape and presentation of an individual entrée, and the ring of egg-balls — a garnish then common in soups and made dishes, now almost entirely forgotten — completed the illusion that this was something other than Sunday's beef.