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Baked Beefsteak a la Jardiniere
Pound a tough steak well, then lay it in saladoil and lemon juice for two hours. Then put in your roaster and cover with 2 sliced tomatoes, an onion and turnip, and some minced sweet herbs. Pour in a cupful of cold water, cover closely and cook slowly, allowing twenty minutes to each pound. Peel 4 good-sized tomatoes and put them into a saucepan to cook. Cut 1 large carrot, 2 turnips, 2 onions, and 4 stalks of celery into dice, and cook them in salted water in separate dishes. When the steak is done place it where it will keep hot while you make the gravy. Strain the gravy, rubbing the vegetables with it through a colander, and thicken with browned flour. Boil one minute, then add the juice of 1 lemon and a glass of sherry.
Place the meat on a hot platter, lay the vegetable dice around it, leaving the tomatoes whole; pour the gravy over all, and then let it stand for a few moments so that the gravy will soak in.
A braise dressed up as a roast: a cheap cut cooked slowly under cover, then served with separately cooked vegetables and a strained, thickened pan gravy. The published timing is the weak point.
- Twenty minutes a pound is not enoughThat is roasting arithmetic applied to a braise. A tough steak — chuck, round, blade — needs two to three hours of slow, covered cooking before the connective tissue turns to gelatin. Cook to fork-tenderness, not to a clock.
- The roasterA covered oval roasting pan with a domed lid, or a Dutch oven. Set the oven at 300-325F, or hold a bare simmer on the stovetop. A cupful of water in a closed pot is a braising liquid, not a boiling one.
- Salad oilAny bland oil of the period — cottonseed, olive, later corn. Use olive or a neutral oil. The two-hour oil-and-lemon soak flavours the surface and does little to tenderize; the slow cooking does that work.
- Keep the four tomatoes wholeThey go into the saucepan on their own to be served intact around the meat. Poach them barely covered, at the gentlest simmer, and lift them out with a slotted spoon before they collapse. They are not the tomatoes that go into the gravy — those are the two sliced ones in the pot.
- Separate dishes for the diceCarrot, turnip, onion and celery cook at different rates and, more to the point, would muddy each other's colour. Cook each in salted water until just tender, drain, and hold warm. Cutting them to an even dice is the point of jardiniere.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted in a dry pan over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of sand. It thickens roughly half as strongly as raw flour, so allow about 2 tablespoons per cup of strained gravy.
- A glass of sherryA wine glass of the period held 2 to 4 fluid ounces; a scant 1/4 cup is a sensible reading. Add it with the lemon juice at the end and give it a minute to lose its raw edge.
- YieldA 2 to 3 lb steak with this quantity of vegetables serves four to six. The final rest lets the gravy soak into the meat, so carve at the table rather than in the kitchen.
A la jardiniere — "in the gardener's manner" — is French kitchen shorthand for a garnish of fresh vegetables cut to uniform dice or batons and cooked separately so each keeps its own colour and bite. It appears constantly in Anglo-American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, usually as a way of giving a plain braise the look of restaurant cooking. What the treatment is really doing here is rescuing a cheap cut: pounding, an acid-and-oil soak, and long covered cooking were the standard household toolkit for round or chuck in an era when a household bought meat by what it could afford rather than by what it wanted. The finishing touches — browned flour, lemon juice, sherry — belong to the same tradition of English gravy-making that the compiled "consolidated library" cookbooks of the turn of the century inherited wholesale from mid-Victorian manuals.