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Beef, Hash, with Croutons
Take a pint of good stock, a table-spoonful of lemon pickle, one of mushroom ketchup, a glass of claret, and about a dozen silver button onions, which have been previously fried in butter and well browned. Put the mixture into a stewpan with the butter in which the onions were fried. Set it over a clear fire until the onions are tender, then pour it all over about two pounds of cold beef cut into slices. Let it stand about twenty minutes, well covered; then draw it nearer to the fire, but do not allow it to boil. Serve up with croutons. To prepare the croutons: take two rounds of bread cut very thin, make them any desired shape, long strips, stars, or rounds; fry them in boiling butter a nice brown colour, drain on a cloth, and serve. Probable cost, without meat, 7d. or 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian réchauffé: cold roast beef warmed through in a sharp, wine-darkened gravy rather than cooked again. Almost everything here turns on temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe beef is already cooked, and boiling will squeeze it dry and stringy in minutes. Keep the liquid at a bare shiver — but do get the meat hot the whole way through rather than leaving it lukewarm for half an hour; sliced cooked beef sitting in warm gravy is exactly the condition bacteria like. Bring the sauce to a simmer, slide in the beef off the heat, and serve within a few minutes of it reaching serving heat.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2½ US cups of stock. Use a well-flavoured brown beef stock; the recipe has no other thickening, so reduce it a little first if you want more than a thin gravy.
- Lemon pickleA once-standard store sauce of lemons salted and spiced, commonly with mace, garlic, horseradish and cayenne, strained and bottled; recipes varied from book to book. It is essentially gone from shops. A tablespoon of the brine from preserved lemons, or lemon juice with a pinch of mace and cayenne, gives a similar sour-spiced note.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup but the thin, black, salty mushroom liquor still sold by a few British makers. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute, used in the same quantity.
- A glass of claretClaret is red Bordeaux; a wine glass of the period runs roughly 2 to 2½ fl oz. Any dry red will do the same work.
- Silver button onionsSmall white pickling or pearl onions, about ¾ inch across. Frozen peeled pearl onions save a tedious job. Brown them properly in butter — that colour is most of the sauce's depth — and expect 15 to 20 minutes of gentle stewing before they are tender.
- CroutonsThese are fried sippets, not salad croutons: thin slices of a firm white loaf cut into stars or fingers and fried in butter. Butter alone browns fast, so keep the heat moderate and drain on paper rather than a cloth.
- Yield and costFour to five as written, with 2 lb of cold beef. The stated 7d. or 8d. is the cost of everything but the meat, which the household was assumed to have left over from a joint.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the réchauffé — the second appearance of Sunday's joint, dressed up well enough that nobody at the table need call it leftovers. A large roast was economical only if the cold remains were used with some invention, and Victorian cookery books devote whole chapters to the problem. The two flavourings here, lemon pickle and mushroom ketchup, were the standard bottled sharpeners of the English larder from the eighteenth century onward, kept to give body and savour to gravies at a moment's notice; mushroom ketchup in particular predates the tomato version by generations. The croutons are the descendant of sippets, a word recorded from the sixteenth century for the fried or toasted bread once set under or around meat to catch the sauce, and shaped fried bread garnishes of this kind have a long history.