Braised Beef
3 lbs. beef from round 2 slices of salt pork 6 peppercorns 3 cups boiling water Carrot, Turnip, Onion, Celery} 1/4 cup each cut in dice Try out fat and remove pieces from frying pan. Trim and wipe meat, season with salt and pepper and dredge with Gold Medal flour. Sear in the fat until all surfaces are brown. Place on trivet in deep granite or earthen dish, surround with vegetables and peppercorns, add 3 cups boiling water. Cover closely and bake slowly four hours. Baste often and turn once. Serve with a brown gravy made from juices in pan.
A pot-roast in all but name, filed under Soups because the braising liquid was expected to do double duty as stock. Nothing here is difficult, but the vessel and the oven temperature need translating.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; "bake slowly" in books of this era is usually read as somewhere around 300-325F. Higher than that and a closely covered dish will still lose more of its three cups of water than you want over four hours.
- The trivet mattersThe meat sits on a rack above the liquid so it steams and roasts rather than stews. If you skip the trivet you will get boiled beef, which is a different and blander dish. A small wire rack or a bed of thick vegetable slabs works.
- "Deep granite or earthen dish"Granite means graniteware — enamelled steel, not stone. Any heavy covered Dutch oven or lidded earthenware casserole of about 5 quarts will do.
- Salt pork and "try out fat"Render the two slices over medium heat until the fat runs and the scraps are crisp, then lift them out. Two slices gives roughly two tablespoons of fat; substitute the same amount of beef drippings or oil if salt pork is unavailable.
- Cut of beef"Beef from round" is lean and will be dry unless fully tender. Bottom round or rump is closest to the original; chuck of the same weight braises more forgivingly and is the usual modern choice.
- Four hours is not excessiveIn a slow oven a 3 lb lean round needs that long for the connective tissue to break down. Test with a fork rather than a thermometer -- you want it to yield, not to hit a temperature.
- Basting and turningThe recipe says baste often and turn once; baste every 40 minutes or so and turn the meat halfway through, checking the water level each time. Top up with boiling water if the pan threatens to run dry, or the gravy will scorch.
- The gravyStrain the pan juices, skim the fat, and thicken with a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of the reserved fat per cup of liquid. The diced vegetables will have collapsed; press them through the strainer for body or discard them.
- YieldServes six generously, with enough liquid left for a cup or two of broth.
Braised beef was a thrifty dish for a turn-of-the-century household. The technique — searing, then long covered cooking on a trivet over a small amount of water — is the French braise as it reached American cookbooks, often credited to the domestic-science movement, which promoted it as an economical way to make tough, cheap cuts like round palatable. The Gold Medal Flour cook book was promotional literature published by the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis, and the dredging step is there partly to brown the meat and partly to keep the brand in the instructions; ordinary all-purpose flour behaves identically. Graniteware, the speckled enamelled steel called for here, was a standard heavy cookware of American kitchens in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before aluminium came to displace it.