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Left-Overs of Beef
A ROAST of meat goes on the table in some households day after day in the same style, with the carver doing his best at each meal to leave it as sightly as possible. Its last appearance is calculated to take away the appetite of an entire family. The careful housewife, whose aim is economy and a healthful, attractive table, on the second day studies the cold roast with a keen eye. It comes from the refrigerator on a clean plate, and with it a bowl of brown gravy to which has been added every drop of the meat juices left in the platter on which the roast was served.
Probably for luncheon she plans cold meat, cut in neat slices from the choicest bits of the roast, rare slices and well done, to appeal to various tastes. The meat is not cut until almost ready to put on the table. It is nicely arranged on a small platter with a garnish of parsley, cress, or cubes of aspic. She does not reheat the gravy to serve on cold plates.
Worcestershire, tomato, or some cold homemade sauce makes a more fitting accompaniment. Then she carves the roast and plans for future meals. The tough outside pieces are laid away to be chopped, the fat to be rendered down for drippings, the tender bits of meat to be deviled, used for pie, ragout, or warmed up in the gravy, while the bones and gristle go to the soup kettle. Not a morsel of the meat is wasted in such a kitchen, and the daintily served, appetizing meals that follow the roast at intervals do not hint to the uninitiated of réchauffés. To make warmed-up meats appetizing, there are various commodities which ought always to occupy a place in the pantry. Have a small jar of onion butter, a bottle of caramel, a glass can filled with browned flour, a jar of finely rolled bread crumbs, Worcestershire Sauce, celery salt, mace, bay leaves, a bottle of McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, cayenne, curry, catsup, canned mushrooms, paprika, kitchen bouquet, and horseradish. The secret of appetizing food is good flavoring, and a frequent varying of flavor has more to do with a tempting table than a large butcher bill.
Meat Minced with Poached Eggs. 2 cupfuls cold meat, 1 cupful gravy or stock, Pepper, Salt, 1 teaspoonful butter.
Chop a pint of meat coarsely, season well, heat in a cupful of left-over gravy or stock. Do not allow it to boil, merely to come to a simmer.
Serve on diamonds of toast with a poached egg on top of each slice.
Bubble and Squeak. 4 cupfuls cold corned beef or beef left from a pot roast, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 cupfuls cold boiled cabbage, Salt and pepper.
Cut the cold meat into small strips and sauté them in a tablespoonful butter. Chop the cabbage and 2 tablespoonfuls butter in an omelet pan. Pepper and salt it, then stir over the fire till it begins to brown. Arrange on a hot platter as a border and int MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK the middle put the hot meat. Serve salt, pepper, and the cider when the with boiled potatoes.
Grilled Slices with Creole Sauce.
Cut from roast beef 6 slices of rarest meat, broil for five minutes over a clear fire, put on a hot plate, and serve with a sauce made as follows: In a saucepan put 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls chopped onion, and 1 tablespoonful chopped green pepper. Fry light brown, stirring constantly. Add 2 tablespoonfuls flour and stir to a paste; then put in a pint brown stock, 2 teaspoonfuls Worcestershire Sauce, a teaspoonful dry mustard, and 2 teaspoonfuls vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook over a slow fire, beating the sauce smooth. Add a teaspoonful chopped parsley and can mushrooms cut in halves. Let the sauce come to a boil, then pour over the grilled meat.
Deviled Beef.
Take slices of rare roast beef and spread with butter on each side, as if you were buttering bread. Over this scrape a mustard made by mixing a tablespoonful vinegar with 3 tablespoonfuls mustard and a dash salt and pepper. Lay on a smoking-hot iron spider and fry till the slices begin to curl over. Mock Terrapin. 6 hard-boiled eggs, 2 cupfuls brown stock, 4 cupfuls cold beef, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, cupful cider.
An essay on managing a roast across several meals, followed by four workable dishes built from the cold remains. The advice holds up; a few of the ingredients and vessels need translating.
- The hinge: never boil reheated meatCold roast beef is already fully cooked, and a second boil squeezes out the juices and turns the fibres to string. The minced meat should barely tremble in the gravy, and the grilled slices want five minutes over high heat and no more.
- Iron spider and omelet panA spider is a heavy cast-iron frying pan, originally footed for hearth cooking; any cast-iron skillet does the job. The omelet pan called for in Bubble and Squeak is simply a wide, shallow, sloped-sided pan.
- Browned flour and kitchen bouquetBrowned flour is plain flour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, kept in a jar for quick brown gravies. Kitchen bouquet is a caramel-and-vegetable browning sauce still sold; the "bottle of caramel" on the pantry list is the same idea, burnt sugar syrup used purely for colour.
- Onion butterMost likely a homemade compound rather than a bought product: butter worked with grated or cooked onion and kept cold, used a spoonful at a time to lift warmed-over meat.
- MustardThe "3 tablespoonfuls mustard" in Deviled Beef means dry mustard powder, slaked with the vinegar into a paste. Using prepared jarred mustard gives a far milder, wetter coating.
- Aspic cubesThe garnish is meat jelly, set from strong stock and diced. If you are not making it, watercress and parsley alone are sufficient.
- YieldsEach of the reheated dishes works out at roughly four servings: two cupfuls of minced meat served on toast with a poached egg to each slice, four cupfuls of beef with two of cabbage for Bubble and Squeak, six grilled slices.
- Sauce for the grilled slicesA pint of brown stock thickened with only two tablespoonfuls of flour stays thin by modern taste. Reduce it uncovered until it coats a spoon rather than adding more flour, which dulls the flavour.
"Bubble and squeak" is an English name recorded from the late eighteenth century, when it meant sliced boiled beef fried with cabbage; the name is traditionally explained by the bubbling and squeaking of the pan, though that is folk explanation rather than established derivation. Only later did it drift toward the potato-and-greens cake now sold under that name in Britain. The wider essay belongs to a distinctly Anglo-American tradition of the réchauffé — the respectable reheated dish — which occupied a large share of household manuals in the decades when home refrigeration meant an ice-box. A single large roast had to feed a family for days, and the cook's skill was measured in her ability to disguise its descent. The pantry list is a good period snapshot: Worcestershire, catsup, curry powder, canned mushrooms and Tabasco (named here with its maker, McIlhenny, as brands often were) had all become fixtures of the American store cupboard by the turn of the century, and were valued precisely because they could make yesterday's beef taste like something else.