Robert Hilliard
RAGOUT a la Deutch Stew one can tomatoes with two chopped onions; add a few chopped cepes, chalots, mushrooms and green peppers, a glass of red wine, about four ounces meat jelly and pepper and salt.
Sauté a fillet of beef, cut into small squares; mix all together and serve very hot.
Sauté some potatoes to place around the dish and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
Sometimes after the theatre at night, my wife and I enjoy some oysters and a salad with perhaps a glass of champagne. We usually go to some quiet place where one may find genuine relaxation and comfort-as far away from the "music and dancing" as possible.
Very truly yours,
COMBINATION SALAD
1 head lettuce 3 beet roots 1 large apple 2 tomatoes Line the bowl with the lettuce and add other ingredients after slicing, in the order quoted. Pour over all the following French dressing.
Take half a teaspoonful each of pepper, mustard, paprika, salt and powdered sugar. Mix well and add one teaspoonful of vinegar and two tablespoonfuls of olive oil. A few walnuts sprinkled over the salad are an improvement.
Salads are among my favorite foods and I think this combination one excellent.
Edith Wynne Mattuson
Two dishes from one page: a beef ragout built on canned tomatoes and a reduced meat jelly, and a plain layered salad. The page text runs together with an adjacent contributor's signature, so read the salad note as belonging to the salad and ignore the trailing name.
- Meat jelly is the hingeThe "four ounces meat jelly" is chilled, heavily reduced brown stock — what a modern kitchen calls demi-glace or a firm veal/beef glace. Roughly half a cup of it, melted in, is what turns canned tomatoes into a sauce with body; substituting plain broth will leave the dish thin and watery.
- Cepes and chalotsCepes are porcini (dried ones, soaked, work well and are easier to find than fresh); chalots is shallots. The recipe lists cepes and mushrooms separately, so use a handful of each rather than doubling up on one.
- Can size and winePeriod canned tomato sizes varied; "one can tomatoes" of this era was often a No. 2 tin of about 20 oz rather than a modern 14-16 oz tin, so the quantity may be a little larger than it looks. "A glass of red wine" is not defined anywhere in the recipe; a period wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so treat the amount as approximate and add it early enough to cook off the raw alcohol.
- Cook the fillet separately and brieflyFillet cut into small squares wants a hard, fast sear in a very hot pan and then folding into the finished sauce off the heat. Simmering tenderloin cubes in tomato will make them grey and dry — the instruction to sauté and then "mix all together" is deliberate.
- Sauce first, meat lastPractically, sweat the onions, add tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, wine and jelly, and let it reduce for 20–30 minutes until it coats a spoon, then sear the beef. Serves about four with the potatoes.
- Beets for the salad"3 beet roots" most likely means beets already boiled or roasted and peeled, since the recipe asks only that they be sliced. Slice them last and lay them on top if you want to avoid staining the apple and lettuce pink.
- The dressing is under-builtHalf a teaspoon each of five seasonings into 1 teaspoon vinegar and 2 tablespoons oil is a very small, very sharp quantity — barely enough to dress one head of lettuce and aggressively mustardy. Scale the oil and vinegar up three or four times, keeping the recipe's own proportion of 2 tablespoons oil to 1 teaspoon vinegar (about 6:1), and add the dry seasonings to taste.
Robert Hilliard was a matinee idol of the American stage, and his contribution to this collection of actors' recipes is exactly the sort of thing a touring leading man would order: a French-hotel ragout, a bowl of oysters after the curtain, champagne somewhere quiet. The "a la Deutch" tag (German style) sits oddly on a dish of cepes, shallots and meat glaze, which is standard restaurant French of the period; the label may reflect the sweet-sour tomato-and-onion base rather than any German technique. The reliance on a spoonful of chilled meat jelly is the clearest period marker here — before commercial stock bases, a well-run kitchen could keep a reduced brown stock setting firm in the cold room and draw on it the way a cook now reaches for a tub of demi-glace. The stray signature at the end of the page appears to belong to the actress Edith Wynne Matthison, whose entry seems to have run together with Hilliard's in transcription.