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Beef, Roast, Minced
Place a spoonful of flour in a pan, and brown it with some butter. Add a pound of cold roast beef finely minced, some gravy, or stock broth, with a glass of wine, and season with herbs chopped up, and salt and pepper. When nearly ready, put in a little butter, and mix it with the other materials. This dish may be sent to table either with eggs ranged round the dish, or with pieces of bread fried crisp in butter.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint: a quick brown roux, minced cold beef, and enough liquid to bind it. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the one rule is that the meat is being reheated, not cooked.
- Proportions"A spoonful of flour" against a pound of meat suggests roughly a tablespoon of flour with a comparable amount of butter. The recipe does not say how much gravy or stock to use; add the liquid gradually until the mince is coated rather than swimming.
- Mince, not grindPeriod mincing meant chopping with a knife or passing through a hand mincer on a coarse plate. A food processor turns cold roast beef to paste in seconds; chop by hand or pulse very briefly.
- Brown the flour properlyCook the flour and butter until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell, three to five minutes over medium heat. This is the whole flavour base, and a pale roux gives a raw, floury sauce.
- A glass of wineA wineglassful in period cookery is usually reckoned at about two fluid ounces, though the measure varied. Red is the usual choice with beef; let it bubble down for a minute before the stock goes in, though a brief simmer will not drive off all the alcohol.
- Do not boil the meatOnce the beef is in, keep the pan at a bare simmer for a few minutes only. Cold roast beef is already fully cooked, and boiling it in gravy makes it stringy and grey.
- The finishing butterThe last knob of butter is stirred in off the heat to gloss the sauce. If the pan is still boiling it will split out into an oily film.
- HerbsThe recipe does not specify which; parsley and thyme are common choices with beef, and marjoram or savory would not be out of place. Add soft herbs at the very end.
- The garnish"Eggs ranged round the dish" means poached or halved hard-boiled eggs set around the rim. Fried sippets of bread are the alternative, cut into triangles and crisped in butter just before serving.
- YieldA pound of beef with sauce serves three, or four with plenty of toast or mashed potato.
Minced roast beef belongs to the large family of Victorian réchauffés — dishes built from yesterday's joint, which in a household that roasted a large piece of beef on Sunday was a weekly necessity rather than a novelty. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton before it, devoted considerable space to such remakes: hashes, rissoles, croquettes, cottage pies and minces, all designed to disguise the fact that the meat had been on the table once already. The technique here — a brown roux slackened with gravy and lifted with wine — is the standard English kitchen sauce of the period, an economical cousin of the French espagnole. The fried bread sippets and the ring of eggs are pure presentation: they turn a bowl of reheated beef into something that can be sent up to the dining room without apology.