Gail Kane
SOUR MEAT
2 pounds of short-rib end stewing beef 4 tablespoonfuls of browned flour 1 tablespoonful of drippings 1 tablespoonful of onion ½ cupful of vinegar 1 cupful of stock 8 whole cloves 8 whole allspice Stick of cinnamon, broken in pieces 2 teaspoonfuls of salt ⅛ teaspoonful of pepper 1 teaspoonful of sugar First wipe the meat, boil slowly until tender, and cut in thin pieces. Cover with sour sauce: brown flour in oven or over a slow fire. Keep stirring; add drippings, onion, and mix until smooth. Add vinegar, stock, spices, sugar, salt and pepper. Boil five minutes, and let stand.
A sauerbraten-style dish in reverse: the beef is cooked first and the sour sauce made separately and poured over. The heading is a printer's artifact — "Perfection Salad" is the tail of the preceding page, and what follows is only the sour meat.
- The pepperThe printed page gives ⅛ teaspoonful of pepper, which is what our text now reads. That is a light hand, in keeping with the half cup of vinegar and the whole cloves, allspice and cinnamon carrying the sauce.
- Browning the flourSpread the 4 tablespoons of flour in a dry skillet or a shallow pan and cook it to the color of a hazelnut, stirring constantly. It scorches in seconds once it starts to color, and browned flour thickens far less than raw flour — the sauce is meant to be pourable, not a gravy.
- "Slow fire" and ovenThe recipe gives no temperature. A low oven, around 300F, or the lowest steady burner setting will do for the flour. Either works; the oven is more forgiving.
- DrippingsBeef or bacon fat from the pan. Butter or a neutral oil substitutes without much loss, though the drippings are what carry the browned-flour flavor.
- The onion measure"1 tablespoonful of onion" means finely minced raw onion, not a whole onion — a spoonful off a small one. Soften it in the fat before the liquid goes in.
- Stock and vinegarSave the beef cooking liquid for the cupful of stock; it is right there and better than water. Cider vinegar was common in American kitchens of the period and is the gentler choice; 1 1/2 cups of distilled white will read aggressively sharp.
- Whole spicesEight cloves, eight allspice berries and a broken cinnamon stick stay whole, so they can be fished out or strained before serving. Five minutes' boiling gets only part of their flavour out; the standing time the recipe calls for will draw more.
- Simmer, do not boil, the beefShort rib end needs 2½ to 3 hours at a bare shiver to go tender. A rolling boil at this stage makes the meat stringy no matter how long it cooks.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of beef serves four to six. It is better the next day, cold or gently rewarmed in its sauce, with boiled potatoes or noodles.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916), a collection of recipes solicited from working stage and screen performers — Gail Kane was then moving between Broadway and early feature films. The dish itself is a plain-English sauerbraten: German-American households across the Midwest and the Eastern cities kept some version of soured beef, and by the 1910s American cookbooks sometimes printed it under names like "sour meat" without the German label. What distinguishes this version is that it skips the long raw marinade entirely; the meat is stewed first and dressed afterward. The browned-flour sauce base is older still, a technique inherited from nineteenth-century American kitchens where flour was toasted in quantity and kept in a jar against the next gravy.