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Beef Gobbets
Cut two pounds of lean beef into small pieces, put it into a stewpan with water sufficient only to cover it, and allow it to simmer gently for an hour. Then add sliced carrots and turnips, a head of celery minced, and a small bunch of savoury herbs, with salt to taste, a crust of bread, and half a tea-cupful of rice. Enclose in a clean muslin bag a few peppercorns, three or four cloves, and a small blade of mace. Put the lid on the pan, and let the whole stew again for another half hour, or until the meat is quite tender. Take out the crust, spice, and herbs. Place the meat on slices of toasted bread, pour the liquid in which it was stewed over it, and serve quickly, as the dish is best hot. Probable cost of beef, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain English beef stew, thickened as much by rice and a crust of bread as by anything else. The main thing to adjust is the cooking time: ninety minutes total will not soften most modern stewing beef.
- GobbetsThe word simply means lumps or chunks — cut the beef into rough 1-inch pieces. Shin, chuck or leg are the right cuts; anything leaner will dry out at this length of cooking.
- TimingAn hour plus half an hour is optimistic. Give the beef 2 to 2½ hours of bare simmering before the vegetables go in, then 30–40 minutes more, and check that the meat pulls apart under a fork rather than trusting the clock.
- The riceHalf a teacupful is roughly 1/3 cup (about 70 g). It swells considerably and will absorb a good deal of the broth, so add extra water when it goes in if you want a soupy result rather than a thick one.
- The crust of breadA Victorian thickener and, it was believed, a way of absorbing grease and strong flavours. It is removed before serving. A hard heel of a stale white loaf works; skip it if you would rather the stew stayed thin.
- Spice bagThe muslin bag is a spice sachet — peppercorns, whole cloves and a blade of mace (a strip of the lacy covering of nutmeg, sold whole in good spice shops). A tea infuser or a square of cheesecloth tied with string does the same job. Ground mace is about 1/4 teaspoon but will cloud the broth.
- A head of celeryIn this period that means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Three or four ribs, finely chopped, is closer to modern taste; the full head makes the dish markedly celery-forward.
- Savoury herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string. It is fished out at the end along with the spice bag and the crust.
- Salt and finishingThe original salts once, with the vegetables, after the first hour; season as you go instead, and taste again once the rice has swelled, since it dulls the seasoning. A stewpan is simply a wide, lidded saucepan — a Dutch oven is the modern equivalent.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef feeds four generously, five with plenty of toast underneath. Toast the bread hard so it does not collapse into paste under the broth.
Gobbet is one of the oldest words in the English kitchen, borrowed from Old French gobet, a mouthful or lump, and used for chunks of meat in cookery writing since the medieval period; by the time Cassell's compilers reached it in the 1870s it survived mainly in the names of old-fashioned dishes like this one. The recipe belongs to a whole class of Victorian cheap-cut stews built around long, gentle simmering, a spice bag rather than loose spice, and starch — here rice and a bread crust — doing the work of a roux. The costing, tenpence a pound for beef and enough for four or five, is characteristic of the book: Cassell's was written for households running on a fixed weekly allowance, and a price per pound was as much a part of the recipe as the method. Serving the meat on toast, with the cooking liquor poured over, was a common practice for stretching a small quantity of meat across a table.