Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef, Brisket of, Stewed
Beef, Brisket of, Stewed
Take six pounds of beef, and, before dressing it, rub it over with vinegar and salt; place it in a stewpan with stock or water sufficient to cover it. Allow it to simmer for an hour, skimming it well all the time. Put in (six each) carrots, turnips, and small onions; and allow all to simmer until the meat is quite tender, which will be in about other two hours. As soon as it is ready the bones should be removed. Boil for a few minutes as much of the gravy as will be required with flour and a little butter, and season it with ketchup, allspice, and mace. Pour a little of it over the brisket, and send the remainder to table in a separate dish. Sufficient for six or seven persons. Probable cost, 7d. to 8d. per pound.
A plain braise of the sort Cassell's assumed every cook could manage without much guidance. The gaps worth filling are the vinegar rub, the liquid level, and the fact that three hours is a starting point rather than a finish line.
- Brisket on the boneThe recipe expects a bone-in brisket, hence the instruction to remove the bones at the end. Modern brisket is sold boneless; six pounds of the point end, or the flat with its fat cap left on, behaves the same way. Add a couple of split beef bones or a veal bone to the pot if you want the gelatine the original took for granted.
- The vinegar and salt rubRubbing the raw meat with vinegar and salt seasons the surface; it is worth doing half an hour before the meat goes in the pot rather than putting it straight to simmer. Ordinary malt or cider vinegar, about two tablespoons, with a tablespoon of salt.
- Simmer, never boil"Simmer" here means bare movement at the surface, around 180-190F. A brisket held at a rolling boil will be stringy however long you leave it. On a modern hob that usually means the lowest setting with the lid ajar; the original is a stewpan dish, but a low oven of about 300F will hold a similar temperature if you prefer to braise it that way.
- Three hours is optimisticCassell's allows one hour plus "other two hours." Six pounds of brisket often wants four to five hours before a skewer slides in without resistance. Cook to tenderness, not to the clock, and top up with hot stock if the meat comes uncovered.
- When to add the vegetablesCarrots, turnips and small onions put in with two hours left will collapse entirely. If you want them to serve alongside, add them for the last forty-five minutes; if you are only after their flavour in the broth, follow the original and strain them out.
- Ketchup means mushroom ketchupIn Victorian British cookery "ketchup" usually meant mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment, rather than the sweet tomato sauce, though tomato ketchup was also known by this date. Mushroom ketchup is still made; a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce or a little soy is the nearest common substitute. Tomato ketchup will make the gravy sweet and pink.
- Mace and allspiceMace is the lacy outer coat of nutmeg, warmer and less sharp than the seed itself; a good pinch of ground mace and four or five allspice berries, crushed, is the right scale for a quart of gravy. Blade mace can be simmered in the gravy and lifted out.
- The gravy"Flour and a little butter" means a beurre manié or a small roux: work an ounce of butter into an ounce of flour and whisk it into the strained, degreased cooking liquid, then boil two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Skim the fat off the stewing liquor first or the sauce will be greasy.
- Yield and restingSix or seven servings, as stated, though six pounds of brisket will stretch further with the vegetables. Let the meat sit in a little of its liquor for fifteen minutes before slicing, and always cut across the grain.
Brisket is the breast of the animal, a hard-working cut laced with connective tissue that only gives way under long, wet, low heat, and for that reason it was among the cheapest beef on the Victorian butcher's block: Cassell's puts it at sevenpence or eightpence a pound, well under the price of sirloin. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revision of the mid-1870s Dictionary of Cookery and reprinted heavily through the end of the century, was aimed squarely at middle-class households running on a fixed weekly sum, and its costings per pound were part of the selling point. The dish itself is unremarkable English boiled beef with root vegetables, distinguished only by the finishing sauce, where mushroom ketchup, allspice and mace do the work that a French kitchen would have got from a demi-glace. That trio of seasonings is a survival from eighteenth-century English cookery, when ketchups were fermented, keeping condiments made from mushrooms, walnuts or anchovies, and long predates the tomato version that now owns the name.