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Beef, Minced, Savoury
Mince very fine three or four small onions, with a little thyme, parsley, chives, and tarragon, and put them into a stewpan, with an ounce of butter, over a gentle fire, until partially cooked. Mix with them half a table-spoonful of flour, and let them become brown. Add pepper, salt, half a glass of white wine, and a glass of stock. When the onions and spices are quite ready, put them into the pan with a sufficient quantity of cold beef finely minced, and allow it to simmer at a gentle heat for half an hour. Before sending to table, mix with it a spoonful of mustard.
A dish built to use up the cold joint, with a small brown sauce made in the same pan. Everything hinges on how the beef and the mustard are treated at the end.
- The mustard goes in off the heatMustard loses its pungency and turns flat and slightly bitter when boiled. Pull the pan from the heat, stir in the spoonful of made mustard, and serve at once.
- "A glass" of liquidVictorian equivalences vary; a wineglassful is commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass of wine may be as little as 1 fl oz, and the unqualified "glass" of stock is equally imprecise. Either way it is a small amount of sauce; scale up if your beef is dry.
- "A sufficient quantity" of beefThe recipe leaves the amount to the cook; the onion base and the small quantity of stock will probably carry something in the region of a pound of finely chopped cooked beef, enough for three or four. Chop by hand rather than using a food processor, which shreds cooked meat into paste.
- Half an hour is for the sauce, not the meatHalf an hour of simmering -- the recipe does put the minced beef in before the half hour begins, but the meat is already cooked and will toughen and dry if pushed. Keep the heat at a bare shiver, lid ajar, and add a spoonful of stock or water if it tightens before the time is up.
- StewpanA heavy, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any wide, thick-bottomed pan works; you want enough surface for the flour to brown evenly.
- Browning the flourHalf a tablespoon into an ounce of butter and softened onions makes a loose roux. Cook it until it smells nutty and takes colour before the wine goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
- The herbsThyme, parsley, chives and tarragon are all meant fresh here, chopped fine with the onion. Tarragon is the assertive one; a teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- ServingOften spooned onto toast, or ringed with mashed or piped potato and browned briefly under the grill.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the cold joint: a Sunday roast large enough to reappear on the table for two or three days, and a cookery literature devoted to disguising it. This is essentially the French hachis, minced cooked meat reheated in a sauce made separately, and the herb mixture of parsley, chives and tarragon points straight at that ancestry, though the fourth herb here is thyme rather than the chervil of the classic fines herbes. The finishing spoonful of mustard is the English contribution, and the reason the dish reads as savoury rather than merely thrifty. It is often said that household manuals of the period insisted reheated meat should never be allowed to boil, a rule that survives in modern practice for the same reason it was given then, that cooked meat fibres seize and dry the moment they are pushed too hard.