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Tomato Beef
Take three pounds of lean beef, cut into large steaks; lay these in the stewpan with seven or eight nice ripe tomatoes, a spoonful of water, and a finely-chopped onion. Stew slowly for one hour and a half. Add salt, pepper, cloves, and just before dishing, a piece of butter as large as an egg, and half a gill of ketchup.
A near-dry braise that relies on the tomatoes for all its liquid, so the seal on the pan matters more than anything else here.
- The hinge: a tight lid and a very low heatOne spoonful of water and eight tomatoes is all the moisture there is. Use a heavy pan with a well-fitting lid over the lowest possible heat, or move it to a 300F oven, and check once or twice that the base is not catching.
- StewpanAny heavy lidded casserole or Dutch oven. "Large steaks" means slabs rather than portions: cut the beef into pieces two to three inches across, not thin frying steaks.
- Cut of beef"Lean beef" for stewing means chuck, blade or shin. Modern lean cuts such as rump or topside will go dry and stringy in a covered pot with no added stock.
- TimingAn hour and a half is optimistic for 3 lb of chuck in large pieces. Expect two to three hours before it is properly tender, and add the butter and ketchup in the last few minutes as directed rather than at the start.
- Half a gillA British gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2.5 fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons. The unqualified "ketchup" of this period was most often the thin mushroom or walnut sort rather than sweet tomato ketchup, though the recipe does not say which; a spoonful of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire sauce gives a similar savoury lift without sugar.
- Butter as large as an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Stirred in off the heat it thickens and glosses the tomato liquor.
- ClovesUnquantified and easily overdone. Three or four whole cloves, fished out before serving, is enough for 3 lb of meat; ground cloves will dominate.
- Tomatoes and yieldSeven or eight ripe tomatoes is about 2 lb; a 28 oz tin of whole tomatoes, drained of most of its juice, works in winter. Serves six with potatoes or rice to take up the sauce.
Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the decades when the tomato was finally moving from suspect novelty to everyday larder item in British kitchens, and recipes like this one show it being used less as a vegetable than as a cooking liquid for a pot needing no stock. The technique is old and thrifty: meat, aromatics, a spoonful of water and a closed lid, so the ingredients stew in their own juices. The bottled ketchup at the end is likely the older English sort, a salty seasoning of the kind a Victorian cook kept on the shelf, and its presence marks the recipe as belonging to a period when a dark, sharp finishing splash was expected in almost any brown stew.