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BEEF, HASH (Norman method)
Put into a bowl a large cup of boiling stock or broth, a wine-glassful of red wine, a little salt and pepper or cayenne, and some lemon pickle ketchup. Fry about two dozen small silver onions in butter till they are of a pale brown colour; mix in two dessert-spoonfuls of flour, and stir till it has become a beautiful amber colour. Pour the contents of the bowl into the pan, and boil the whole until the onions are done; then put some small, well-cut slices of roast or boiled beef into a clean stewpan, and pour the gravy and onions over them. Allow it to stand till the meat has acquired the flavour of the gravy; then make it very hot, but do not allow it to boil. Serve quickly. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, exclusive of meat. 10d.
A way of reheating cold roast beef without cooking it twice, built on a brown onion gravy. Everything depends on the final warming being gentle.
- Never let it boilAlready-cooked beef held at a simmer turns grey and stringy within minutes. Bring the gravy to a boil in the frying pan, then pour it over the sliced meat and warm it only to steaming, about 165F, before serving.
- A wine-glassfulIn this period usually reckoned at 2 to 2½ fl oz, so about 4 to 5 tablespoons of red wine. A "large cup" of stock is not a fixed measure; 8 to 10 fl oz is a reasonable reading.
- Silver onionsSmall white onions, sold now as pearl or pickling onions. Two dozen is about 12 oz; frozen peeled ones work and need no blanching.
- Lemon pickle ketchupA Victorian bottled condiment of lemons, horseradish, garlic and spice, no longer made. Worcestershire sauce with a squeeze of lemon juice gives a comparable sharp, salty lift; start with a teaspoon and taste.
- The roux colour"A beautiful amber" means cooking the flour with the onion butter for two or three minutes past blond, until it smells nutty. Stop short of dark brown or the gravy turns bitter and loses thickening power.
- Slicing the beefCut cold roast or boiled beef across the grain as thinly as you can manage. Thick chunks will not take up the gravy in the standing time and will still be cool in the middle when the outside is hot.
- The standing timeThe recipe gives no length for the soak, and its twenty minutes may cover the frying and boiling instead. Either way the standing is the flavouring step, not a cooking step, and happens off the heat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. On a modern reckoning of about 4 oz cooked meat a head, a pound of beef with this quantity of gravy would serve four, with mashed or boiled potatoes to catch it.
Cassell's fills whole columns with ways of using up the joint, which is what a household with a Sunday roast and no refrigeration actually needed on Monday. The "Norman method" tag points at the butter-and-cider-country cooking of Normandy; British cookery writers of the 1870s onward attached French regional labels freely, and the attribution is best read as a style marker rather than documented provenance. The lemon pickle ketchup is a period detail, though it dates the recipe only loosely: bottled savoury ketchups made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or lemons were a staple of the Victorian store cupboard, kept for exactly this purpose of giving reheated meat a sharpness it had lost. The costing in pence, given "exclusive of meat", tells you the book expected the beef to be already paid for and sitting in the larder.