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Beef, Stewed, with Oysters
Take two pounds of tender steak about an inch and a half thick. Melt two ounces of butter in a stewpan, put in the steak, and brown it lightly. Dredge a little flour over it, and pour in as much boiling stock as will cover the bottom of the pan but not the meat. Add the strained liquor from a dozen and a half oysters. Cover the pan closely, and stew the meat very gently till tender. Skim the liquor, season it with pepper and salt, and add the oysters. Put the beef in a hot dish, and send to table with the oysters upon it and the gravy poured round it. Time to stew the beef, about one hour and a half. Probable cost, 4s.
A Victorian braise that leans on oyster liquor for depth rather than long-reduced stock. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the stew at a bare tremble, and adding the oysters at the very last moment.
- The oysters go in at the endThey need only a minute or two in the hot, seasoned liquor — just until the edges ruffle. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, which is why the recipe adds them after the beef is already cooked and skimmed.
- Cut of beef"Tender steak" is not specified further; for a ninety-minute stew a modern cook is better served by a braising cut such as chuck or blade than by a grilling steak. A sirloin or ribeye stewed this long will be dry and stringy; you want connective tissue that melts.
- Oysters and their liquorA dozen and a half is eighteen oysters. Shucked oysters in a tub, sold with their liquor, work perfectly well — strain the liquor through muslin to catch shell grit, since it carries most of the flavour into the gravy.
- Liquid levelThe instruction to cover the bottom of the pan but not the meat is deliberate. This is a braise, not a boil; the steam does much of the work and the reduced gravy stays concentrated.
- Heat and timing"Very gently" means barely a bubble, lid on, around 90 minutes on the lowest burner setting, as the recipe's "about one hour and a half" indicates. A rolling simmer will tighten the beef long before it becomes tender.
- Seasoning lastOyster liquor and stock both carry salt, and the gravy concentrates as it cooks. Taste after skimming, before you add salt.
- The flour dredgeTwo ounces of butter and a light dusting of flour make a loose thickening in the pan. If the finished gravy is thinner than you like, lift out the beef and reduce the liquor briefly before the oysters go in.
- Yield and costTwo pounds of steak serves four generously. The "probable cost, 4s." is a late-Victorian shilling price, included so a housekeeper could budget the week — it is of no use as a modern guide.
Beef and oysters were paired frequently in nineteenth-century British cookery, and the reason was economic as much as gastronomic: for much of the century oysters were plentiful and cheap enough in the great cities to be used as a savoury lift for a piece of meat rather than as a luxury, though prices were already rising in the later decades. Oyster liquor supplies a savoury depth without the expense of a long-simmered brown sauce, which is the job it does here. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households, places the dish among its stewing instructions and gives a probable cost in shillings, a convention of the period's manuals aimed at mistresses who checked the cook's accounts. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries overfishing, pollution and disease damaged the English oyster beds and drove prices up; the beef-and-oyster combination survived mainly in steak and oyster pudding, and in time the oysters dropped out of that too.