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Sea Stew
Peel and slice a large onion, brown it in a bit of hot dripping. Cut one pound of buttock steak into squares, and brown these also. Sprinkle the steak and onion with flour, pour in half a pint of stock, and boil up; skim well. Make a dozen small dumplings by any of the recipes given (see DUMPLINGS, PLAIN, also SAVOURY DUMPLINGS). While the meat is cooking, par-boil a pound of potatoes, slice them, and add to the steak. Stew the meat until done, which will take about two hours. The dumplings should be steamed separately, and put round a hot dish, with the meat, etc., in the centre. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A plain braise of stewing beef, onion and potato, with the dumplings cooked apart so they stay light. Two things decide the result: the heat must stay below a boil, and the potatoes must not go in too early.
- Buttock steakAn old butcher's term for the top of the round — modern topside, or top rump. In the US, ask for top round or bottom round. Any lean stewing beef in 1-inch cubes behaves the same way.
- DrippingBeef dripping, saved from a roast. Any high-smoke-point fat works; the point is to get a hard brown crust on the meat and onion, which is where most of the colour and flavour of the finished gravy comes from.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups or 285 ml. That is deliberately little — this is a thick stew, not a soup. Top up with hot water only if the pan threatens to go dry.
- Boil up, then stop boilingThe instruction to boil and skim is for clearing the scum off the freshly floured liquid. After that, hold it at the barest tremble, around 180F/82C. A rolling boil for two hours will squeeze the beef into strings.
- When the potatoes go inParboiled sliced potato added at the start will collapse over two hours and cloud the gravy. Add it for the last 30 to 40 minutes; it will finish cooking and thicken the sauce a little as it does.
- Oven alternativeA lidded casserole at 300F (150C) holds a steadier temperature than a burner and needs no watching. Reckon on the same two hours.
- The dumplingsSteaming them separately keeps them from turning into flour thickener and lets them rise properly. Plain suet dumplings of walnut size need about 20 minutes over simmering water; do not lift the lid partway.
- Yield and the priceOne pound of beef and a pound of potatoes will serve three, or four modestly. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is eighteen pence in pre-decimal money; costings of this kind appear throughout the book's entries.
Cassell's ran to thousands of short entries of exactly this kind — cheap cuts, long moist heat, a suet dumpling to make the meat go further — aimed at a household cooking on a fixed weekly allowance, which is why nearly every entry carries a probable cost. The name is often connected to the sea pie, a documented shipboard dish in which meat and vegetables were layered with crust and cooked in one pot; galley cooking favoured anything that could be left to itself in a covered pot on a swinging stove, and stews of salt or fresh beef with dumplings were standard fare in both naval and merchant service. How much of that connection survived into a domestic dictionary is uncertain — the recipe itself makes no maritime claim, and one might read the separate steaming of the dumplings as suggesting a shore-side kitchen with more than one pot to spare, though that is inference rather than evidence.