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Beef, Cold, Scalloped
Fill some scallop-shapes with a little mince of beef, highly-seasoned with salt, pepper, and a little grated ham or tongue. Add to it as much stock with a little walnut pickle as the meat will absorb when heated gently over the fire. The mince must not be thin and watery. Fill the shapes and cover them with mashed potato or bread-crumbs. Warm in the oven, with butter sliced over the top, which should be prettily marked and of a nice brown colour. Time to warm, about ten minutes. Probable cost, without the meat, 6d. or 8d.
A Victorian way with the Sunday joint: cooked beef minced, bound with a sharp gravy and baked in shells. The whole thing hinges on the mince being moist but not swimming.
- Scallop-shapesReal or china scallop shells, or small tin patty moulds; ramekins or a shallow gratin dish will serve. The recipe gives no quantities, so judge by appetite: a shell of roughly 1/2 cup capacity, one or two per head as a light supper.
- Walnut pickleThe dark, spiced liquor from pickled green walnuts. Bottled walnut ketchup, made from green walnuts and still sold by British specialists, is the nearest thing to hand, though not strictly the same as the pickle liquor. Mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce gives a comparable salty, malty depth; use it by the teaspoon, as it is assertive.
- Grated ham or tongueFrozen and grated on the coarse side of a box grater, cooked ham or pressed ox tongue shreds finely. It is there for salt and savour, so season the beef lightly until after it goes in.
- The consistencyAdd stock a spoonful at a time over low heat until the meat holds together and no liquid pools at the edge of the pan. A wet mince will soak the potato crust and refuse to brown.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature, only 'warm in the oven' for about ten minutes. The contents are already cooked, so the aim is to heat through and colour the top; a hot oven, around 400-425F, will do it, and the grill or broiler for the last minute or two finishes the browning if the butter has not done it.
- "Prettily marked"Score the mashed potato with the tines of a fork before the butter goes on. The raised ridges catch the heat and brown while the grooves stay pale.
- Cold beef, reheatedBring leftover beef out of the refrigerator no more than an hour before, and get the filled shells into a hot oven until the centre is steaming, not merely warm.
- CostThe 6d. or 8d. covers potato, breadcrumbs, butter and pickle only, on the assumption that the beef itself is left over and therefore free.
Cassell's belongs to the era of the large joint and the endless afterlife it demanded: a rib of beef roasted on Sunday might reappear cold, then hashed, then scalloped, over the days that followed. Scalloping meant baking a savoury mixture in shells, oysters and fish being the other usual tenants. Walnut ketchup, the pickle called for here, was one of the standard English store-cupboard sauces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made from unripe green walnuts salted down and left to blacken; it added savour and colour to gravies and reheated meat. The recipe's frank pricing, and its assumption that the meat costs nothing because it is already in the house, tells you the book was written for a cook answering to a mistress who kept accounts.