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BEEF, STEWED (French method)
Take two pounds of steak, cut thick. Brown on both sides in fat put in a stewpan, and cover with broth. Mince a small carrot, two shallots, a bay-leaf, a sprig of thyme, and two ounces of bacon. Fry these for a minute in butter, pour a glass of claret over them, and put the mixed vegetables upon the steak. Simmer gently two hours. Strain, if necessary thicken the sauce with cornflour, add pepper and salt. Pour it over the steak, and serve. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pound. Sufficient for four persons.
A compact braise in the French manner — brown, moisten, aromatise, simmer. The Victorian text assumes you know what a stewpan does and how much liquid to use, so a few things need spelling out.
- The cut"Steak, cut thick" here means braising steak — chuck, blade or thick flank in a single piece about 1.5 inches deep, not a grilling cut. Two pounds of sirloin simmered for two hours would be a waste of money and would go stringy.
- A glass of claretIn Victorian recipe usage a wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, though the term drifted; 1/4 cup of dry red is the sensible reading. Claret meant red Bordeaux, so a Cabernet- or Merlot-based wine sits closest to the original.
- Cover with brothNo quantity is given because the amount depends on your pan. Use a heavy pan barely wider than the meat so it takes roughly a pint to two pints of beef stock to come level with the top of the steak; a wide pan will demand far more liquid and give a thin, washed-out sauce.
- ShallotsTwo small shallots, finely minced, is the right scale against a single carrot.
- BaconVictorian bacon was generally dry-cured and saltier than most modern bacon, so unsmoked pancetta or lardons are usually a closer match than thin streaky rashers. Cut it into small dice so it renders in the minute of frying.
- Simmer gentlyThe instruction to simmer gently is the hinge. Held at a bare tremble — somewhere around 180F, on the lowest burner — the connective tissue softens into gelatin and the meat stays moist; at a true boil the muscle fibres tighten and two hours produces dry, shredded beef in good sauce.
- Straining and thickeningStrain the cooking liquid off, skim the fat, and reduce it hard before you thicken — the sauce will need concentrating after two hours under a lid. Cornflour is cornstarch; a teaspoon slaked in cold water is ample for the volume here, and it should boil for a moment to lose its raw taste.
- ServingSufficient for four, as stated, with the steak carved across the grain into thick slices. Potatoes, mashed or plain boiled, suit it well and catch the sauce.
The tag "French method" is doing real work in a book like this. Cassell's — if this is the Dictionary of Cookery, whose "Probable cost / Sufficient for" formula this page follows — was written for households that had absorbed a generation of argument, in which Eliza Acton and Alexis Soyer were prominent voices in print, that English cooking wasted good meat by roasting or boiling it plainly while the French extracted more flavour from cheaper cuts through slow braising with wine and aromatics. What is described here is close to a small boeuf en daube or estouffade: browned meat, carrot and shallot, bacon for fat and savour, bay and thyme, and enough red wine to sharpen the whole — though a daube proper usually begins with a marinade, which this does not. The costing — 1s. 4d. per pound — is characteristic of the dictionary format, which treated the household budget as part of the recipe, and it suggests a modest cut rather than a prime one. Claret meant red Bordeaux to a British reader of the period; the English word is an adaptation of the French clairet, and Bordeaux wine had been familiar in the English trade since the Middle Ages.