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Beef, Cold Roast, Minced
Mince about three-quarters of a pound of beef, and chop into it a seasoning of herbs and shallot. Brown a lump of butter with a little flour in a frying-pan, add some stock broth, and simmer with the seasoning for two or three minutes. Put the mince into a stewpan, pour the gravy over, and simmer again till tender. Serve with mashed potatoes or sippets of bread. Time, fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian way of using up Sunday's roast: cooked beef chopped fine and warmed through in a quick brown gravy. The whole thing hinges on restraint, since the meat is already cooked.
- Do not stew it long"Simmer again till tender" is misleading — already-roasted beef will not become more tender, only drier and stringier. Bring the gravy to a bare simmer, add the meat, and heat for three to five minutes; the stated fifteen minutes covers the whole operation, not the mince alone.
- Mince means chopped, not groundIn nineteenth-century usage "mince" here means cold roast hand-chopped fine with a knife, not put through a machine. A food processor will pulp it to paste; pulse only briefly if you use one at all.
- QuantitiesThree-quarters of a pound of cooked beef serves two generously. For the gravy, figure about 1 oz butter, a scant tablespoon of flour and 3/4 cup of stock — enough to coat the meat, not to float it.
- Herbs and shallotThe recipe says only "herbs"; parsley and thyme are the usual choice, with a small shallot, all chopped fine. Cook the shallot in the butter before the flour goes in, or it will stay raw and sharp in a five-minute sauce.
- Brown the roux properly"Brown a lump of butter with a little flour" means cooking the flour to a hazelnut colour before the stock goes in — that browning is the whole flavour of the dish. Add the stock off the heat and whisk to avoid lumps.
- Stock brothBeef stock, ideally the pan juices or bones from the original roast. A commercial stock cube will read as very salty against unsalted cooked beef; taste before adding any salt.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, fried in butter or dripping until crisp, set around the edge of the dish. Toast cut into points does the same job.
Minced cold roast belongs to the large Victorian literature of "rechauffés" — the second appearance of the joint, which in a household that roasted a large piece of beef would have been a matter of routine rather than thrift alone. The recipe gives the probable cost as one shilling, a habit of the period's dictionaries of cookery, which were written with the mistress planning a week's meals in mind as well as the person at the stove. The technique is the basic English brown sauce: butter and flour cooked to colour, moistened with stock, seasoned with herbs and shallot. The same method underlies mince served on toast, mince under a potato crust, and the reheated hashes that fill the leftover chapters of nineteenth-century manuals.