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BEEF, MINCED (a la Bourgeoise)
Brown a piece of butter, the size of a walnut, rolled in flour, in a stewpan. Cut some roast beef into small pieces, and put them, with a little parsley, basil, thyme, pepper, and nutmeg, into the brown butter. Shake the pan for some minutes over a slow fire, and add equal parts of wine and stock broth. Simmer until the meat is tender, and before sending to table add a table-spoonful of the best oil. Time to simmer, twenty minutes, or until tender. Two pounds of beef will be found sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of turning cold roast beef into a second dinner. The whole thing rests on the fact that the meat is already cooked, which changes how you treat it.
- "Minced" means chopped, not groundThe instruction is to cut roast beef into small pieces; no size is given. Ground or paste-like texture is not what is wanted; the pieces should stay recognisable in the sauce.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Rolled in flour it becomes a small kneaded roux; work in about a tablespoon of flour and cook it in the pan until it smells nutty and takes colour.
- Liquid quantity is left to you"Equal parts of wine and stock broth" gives no volume. For 2 lb of meat, about 1/2 cup of each is enough to make a sauce that clings rather than a stew; add more only if the pan dries out.
- The wineA dry red is the usual reading for beef. Whatever you use, let it simmer uncovered for a few minutes before the meat softens, or the sauce keeps a raw winey edge.
- Twenty minutes on already-roasted beefThis is the hinge. Cooked beef does not tenderise much further — it mostly tightens and dries. Keep the heat at a bare tremble, and take the pan off as soon as the pieces are heated through and the sauce has body, even if that is well short of twenty minutes.
- A slow fireLow heat throughout, both for the initial shaking in butter and for the simmer. High heat here browns nothing usefully and seizes the meat.
- Basil, thyme, parsleyThe recipe does not say; fresh is the likelier intent. If using dried, cut the quantity to about a third and add it with the butter. Nutmeg wants a scant grating — it is a background note in this kind of brown sauce, not a flavour.
- The spoonful of oil at the endOlive oil, stirred in off the heat to gloss and enrich the sauce. If the pan is boiling it will simply split and float.
- YieldAs stated, 2 lb of beef serves three or four. Rice, mashed potato or plain boiled macaroni takes the sauce well.
À la bourgeoise is one of the most useful phrases in nineteenth-century cookery books: it signals plain household cooking rather than restaurant work — a dish built from what the kitchen already had, seasoned with garden herbs and finished without garnish or aspic. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for exactly that kind of kitchen, and a number of its beef entries are concerned not with roasting a joint but with what to do with it on the second and third day. A Sunday sirloin in a middle-class Victorian household might reappear as hash, rissoles, cottage pie or a dish like this one. The tablespoonful of "the best oil" at the finish is a small tell: olive oil was an imported, faintly Continental ingredient in British cooking of the period, generally bought in modest quantities and used as a flavouring rather than a cooking medium.