Beef a la Mode
Get a thick piece of beef of 4 or 5 pounds from the round or rump. Trim the edges into good shape, wipe, and put it into a deep earthen bowl or jar. Pour over it a cupful of vinegar, in which have been steeped 1 finely chopped onion, 2 tablespoonfuls salt, 1 saltspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful each cloves, allspice, and mustard; a blade or two of mace and a bay leaf. Turn the meat around in this pickle, and leave in it for several hours, turning it over several times. Make several deep incisions and fill them with a dressing of bread crumbs seasoned plentifully with salt, pepper, finely minced onion, or a few drops of onion juice, kitchen bouquet, and sweet herbs. Mix with the beaten yolk of 1 egg a tablespoonful of butter or drippings, moistened sufficiently with hot water. Tie well with twine or strips of muslin, or skewer the incisions with wooden toothpicks to keep the stuffing in, and dredge it with flour.
Mince or slice 2 onions, 1 small carrot, fry them in half beef drippings and half fat salt pork. When brown, put in the meat and brown it on all sides, and pour in enough boiling water to half cover the meat. Tie a tablespoonful of the mixed herbs and a small onion in a piece of cheesecloth and put in the pan with the meat; cover closely, and let it simmer three or four hours. When tender take up on a hot platter, take off the strings. Skim the fat from the liquor, take out the bag of herbs, and make a thickened gravy; boil, and strain the gravy over the meat.
A braise in the old French style: an aromatic vinegar pickle, a stuffed and larded joint, then a long moist simmer. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the measures and materials need translating.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerThree to four hours of gentle bubbling is what turns round or rump tender; a rolling boil in the same time will leave the meat stringy and dry. Hold the liquid at 180-190F, lid on, and check that the pan is only just murmuring.
- Marinate cold, not on the counter"Leave in it for several hours" assumed a cool larder. Do the pickling in the refrigerator, in glass, ceramic or a zip bag, and turn the meat every hour or so.
- Saltspoonful and other old measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A cupful is 8 fl oz. Two tablespoons of salt in the marinade is deliberate — it is a brine as much as a flavouring — and the meat is not cooked in that liquid, so it does not carry through as harshly as it reads.
- Mace and kitchen bouquetA "blade" of mace is one dried strip of nutmeg aril; a pinch of ground mace substitutes. Kitchen Bouquet is a caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce, still sold; any browning sauce or a teaspoon of dark soy will serve the same purpose of colouring the stuffing.
- Sweet herbsThe period shorthand for the mild kitchen herbs — thyme, marjoram, parsley, savory, a little sage. The tablespoonful tied in cheesecloth later is the same mixture, functioning as a bouquet garni; a tea infuser or a bundle tied with string works as well.
- Fat salt porkUnsmoked cured pork belly or fatback. Blanch it a minute if it is very salty, or use bacon fat, keeping in mind that bacon brings smoke the original did not have.
- Stuffing the incisionsCut the pockets with a narrow boning knife and push the crumb dressing well in, then truss firmly. Butcher's twine is easier to remove than toothpicks and will not splinter into the gravy.
- Oven optionThe recipe is a covered stovetop braise, but a heavy lidded Dutch oven in a moderate oven (around 300F) holds steadier heat than a burner and needs less attention. Check for tenderness at around three hours, as on the stove.
- Gravy and yieldAfter skimming, thicken the strained liquor with a roux of about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per 2 cups of liquid, and boil it a full two minutes to lose the raw flour taste. A 4-5 lb joint serves six to eight, and it slices far more neatly after resting 15 minutes.
Beef à la mode — literally "beef in the fashion" — is the anglicised name for the French bœuf à la mode, a larded and marinated braise of a tough cut that appears in French cookery texts before it reached American household manuals. It travelled early and thoroughly: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks print it very often, and shops selling "à la mode beef" are recorded in nineteenth-century cities including Baltimore and Philadelphia. The version here is the compendium-cookbook form of the dish, aimed at a cook working with round or rump — cheap, hard-working muscle that no amount of roasting will soften. The vinegar pickle, the stuffed incisions and the long covered simmer are all doing the same job by different means: breaking down connective tissue and putting flavour into meat that has little fat of its own. That it earns a full paragraph in a general household library, rather than a specialist French volume, suggests how far the dish had been absorbed into ordinary American cooking.