Ragout of Beef
Put in a stewpan slices of cold roast or boiled beef. To each pound of meat add 3 small onions, salt and pepper. Cover with boiling water and simmer two hours or more, or until the meat is so tender as to fall readily to pieces. Add 1/2 cupful of tomatoes, 1/2 cupful of chopped mushrooms, a few pickled walnuts or capers, and 1/2 teaspoonful of curry powder. Mix 1 tablespoonful of flour with water until smooth, add a little of the hot liquor and stir well; pour into the hot ragout, and cook ten or fifteen minutes longer.
Serve with mashed potatoes.
A leftovers dish rather than a from-scratch stew: it starts with meat that is already cooked, so the long simmer is about softening and flavour exchange, not cooking the beef through. The main adjustment for a modern kitchen is to keep the liquid at a bare tremble and to build back the seasoning that plain boiling water dilutes.
- Start with the right beefCold roast or boiled beef means yesterday's joint, cut in slices; the recipe does not specify a thickness. Well-done brisket, chuck or pot roast works; lean rare roast beef or steak will only turn dry and stringy over two hours.
- Simmer, never boilTwo hours of actual boiling will shred already-cooked meat into threads. Hold the pan at 180-190F, with the surface barely moving, and check at 90 minutes — the target is meat that falls apart when pressed, not meat that has already dissolved.
- "Cover with boiling water"Adding boiling rather than cold water keeps the pan temperature up, but plain water gives a thin, flat gravy. Beef stock is a straightforward substitution and closer to what the finished dish is aiming at.
- TomatoesA half cupful of tomatoes here was most likely canned, roughly chopped, though fresh would serve equally well. A half cup of drained canned chopped tomatoes, or two fresh plum tomatoes seeded and diced, is the equivalent.
- Pickled walnuts and capersPickled walnuts are still sold by British delicatessens and online; they are soft, black, and intensely malty-sour. Two or three, sliced, per pound of meat is plenty. Capers are the easier substitute and about a tablespoon, rinsed, does the same job of cutting the richness.
- Curry powder as seasoning, not flavourHalf a teaspoon to a pound of beef is a background note in the Victorian and Edwardian manner, not a curry. Commercial curry powder of the period was generally built around turmeric, coriander and cumin; any mild modern blend is the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
- The flour slurryMixing the flour with cold water and then loosening it with a ladle of the hot liquor prevents lumps. The ten to fifteen minutes afterwards is not optional — it is what cooks out the raw flour taste.
- Yield and seasoningThe recipe states no yield; a pound of cooked beef treated this way will stretch to two or three with mashed potato. Salt at the end as well as the start: two hours of simmering with added water needs the seasoning checked again before the flour goes in.
Ragoût is simply the French for a stew of cut-up meat, from ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the nineteenth century English cookery books had thoroughly domesticated both the word and the idea. What this version really represents is the household economics of a period when a large joint was roasted on Sunday and had to reappear, disguised, for several days afterwards — a whole genre of "remade" or "réchauffé" dishes fills the meat chapters of books like this one. The pickled walnuts, capers and pinch of curry powder are the giveaways: they are all sharp or aromatic things kept permanently in the store cupboard, whose purpose is to make twice-cooked beef taste deliberate rather than second-hand. Curry powder in particular had become a standard British and American seasoning by this date, used by the half-teaspoon in soups, hashes and sauces where no one expected to taste anything Indian.