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Spiced Beef
Cut the meat in small pieces, cover with boiling water, skim carefully as it boils, and simmer until the meat falls to pieces and the liquor is reduced to half. Remove the meat, season the liquor highly with salt, pepper, sage and thyme, add it to the meat, and mix with a fork till the meat is all broken. Pack in a brick-loaf pan; when cold cut in thin slices.
— Mrs. Helen E. Munger
A potted-beef loaf that sets on its own gelatin, written for cooks who already knew the method and needed only the proportions of seasoning. The original gives no weights, so the cut and the reduction do all the work.
- The cut is the hingeYou need collagen-rich meat — shin, shank, chuck, oxtail or a cut with plenty of connective tissue. Lean stewing steak will shred but the cooking liquor will not set, and the loaf will crumble when sliced.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Two to three pounds of boneless shin covered by about two quarts of boiling water is one workable reading; it should roughly fill a loaf tin of the usual 9x5-inch sort and serve eight or so as a sandwich meat.
- "Simmer until the meat falls to pieces"On a modern stove that is three to four hours at a bare tremble, lid ajar. Reducing the liquor by half at the same time is easier if you keep the heat low and let evaporation do it rather than boiling hard, which clouds the stock and toughens the fibres.
- SkimmingThe scum that rises in the first ten minutes is coagulated protein and should come off; the fat that rises later can be left, since it helps seal the top of the loaf, or lifted off the chilled loaf afterwards.
- Season the liquor, not the meatSalting and spicing the reduced stock before it goes back in distributes flavour evenly through the shredded meat. "Highly" means noticeably more than you would season a stew — the loaf is eaten cold, and cold blunts salt and herbs. Dried sage and thyme, about a teaspoon of each, plus plenty of black pepper.
- Brick-loaf panA plain rectangular tin, the shape that gave the loaf its square slices. Line it with plastic wrap or parchment so the set loaf lifts out cleanly; press the mixture down firmly to drive out air pockets.
- ChillingThe recipe's "when cold" would have meant a cool cellar, larder or icebox. Cover and refrigerate at least six hours, preferably overnight, and treat it as you would any cooked meat — eat within three or four days, or slice and freeze.
- ServingThin slices on buttered bread with mustard or pickle. If the loaf refuses to hold together, warm it, stir in a little more reduced stock or a softened leaf of gelatin, and re-chill.
Spiced beef of this kind belongs to the long tradition of potted meats — meat cooked to collapse, packed tight, and kept for a while by its own fat and gelatin rather than by smoke or brine. Before household refrigeration a loaf like this was a way of turning a cheap, tough cut into something that kept for a few days in a cool pantry and could be sliced cold for sandwiches, picnics and cold suppers with no further cooking. Community and church fundraising collections of this sort gathered exactly these workaday, weights-optional recipes from named local women, on the assumption that any reader could judge for herself how much shin to buy and how highly to season. It shares its name with, but is quite different from, the clove-and-allspice "spiced beef" brines associated with Ireland at Christmas, which are a cured preparation altogether.