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Beef, Miroton Of
Put three ounces of butter into a frying-pan, with three onions, thinly sliced, and a pound of cold roast beef, under-cooked, if possible, and cut into small slices. Turn the meat constantly, so that it will be evenly browned on both sides. When of a nice colour, put in about half a pint of good gravy, with salt and pepper to taste. Allow it to simmer a few minutes, but do not boil, or the meat will be shrunken and hard. Serve hot. This is a very nice and cheap dish. Probable cost, about 6d., without the beef.
A leftovers dish that stands or falls on temperature control: the gravy must never reach a rolling boil once the beef is in it.
- Do not boilAlready-cooked beef, reheated at a boil, contracts and turns stringy. Keep the pan at a bare shiver — surface trembling, no bubbles breaking — for three or four minutes, just long enough to heat through.
- Weights and volumesThree ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons (85 g). Half a pint in this British book is an Imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or 1¼ US cups; a level US cup will do.
- "Good gravy"The book assumes yesterday's roast gravy or a well-reduced brown stock. Use about a cup of decent beef stock, reduced slightly so it has some body, or thin leftover gravy to a pouring consistency.
- Underdone beef mattersSlices from a rare or medium-rare roast survive the reheating with something left to give. Well-done beef will only get drier here, so cut it thinner and shorten the time in the pan.
- Cook the onions properly firstThree sliced onions need eight to ten minutes in the butter over medium heat before the meat goes in, or they stay raw and sharp while the beef browns. Move them to the side of the pan while you colour the slices.
- Pan and heatA wide skillet over medium-high heat, in two batches if needed. Crowding steams the beef instead of browning it, and the browning is where the flavour comes from.
- YieldA pound of beef feeds two generously or three modestly. Mashed or boiled potatoes suit it, and a spoonful of mustard or a splash of vinegar at the end lifts it.
- That "6d."Sixpence, the cost of the butter, onions and gravy alone — the recipe explicitly costs the dish "without the beef," which is treated as already bought for an earlier meal.
Miroton is a French kitchen term for cooked meat sliced and reheated with onions, usually in a brown sauce; b inuf en miroton was a common second life of the boiled or roast beef from a previous meal, and the origin of the name is generally given as obscure. Its appearance in Cassell's, complete with a costing in pence, shows how thoroughly Victorian household cookery was organised around the joint: a large piece of meat was roasted once and then reappeared as hash, rissoles, cold cuts or a miroton until it was gone. The insistence on beef "under-cooked, if possible" is a practical instruction to the cook of the first meal as much as the second, and the warning against boiling is one of the few points on which nineteenth-century advice and modern practice largely agree.