Meats: Beef
1/2 teaspoonful pepper, Braised Beef. 3 pounds beef, 2 ounces fat salt pork, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls salt, teaspoonful pepper, 1½ pints water, 2 tablespoonfuls minced onion, 2 tablespoonfuls minced carrot, 2 whole cloves, 1 sprig parsley.
Cut the pork into thin slices and fry until brown and crisp. Take out the pork, putting the vegetables in the fat remaining in the pan, and cook slowly fifteen minutes. Rub MEATS half the pepper and 2 teaspoonfuls salt into the piece of meat, and place it in a deep graniteware pan. When the vegetables are cooked, put them with the meat, first pressing from them as much fat as possible. Into the fat remaining in the pan put the flour, and stir until it becomes brown. Add the water gradually, stirring all the while. Season this gravy with the remainder of the salt and pepper, and boil for five minutes; then pour over the meat in the pan. Add the cloves and parsley.
A straightforward pot roast, written in the clipped style of a cooking-school manual. The one thing it omits is the cooking itself — the text stops once the gravy is poured over the meat, so the braise has to be supplied from practice.
- The missing stepThe recipe as printed ends once the gravy is poured over the meat and the cloves and parsley are added: it gives no cooking time, temperature or method. The pan needs to be covered tightly and the meat cooked slowly in the liquid until a fork meets no resistance, turning it once or twice so the exposed side does not dry -- but all of that has to be supplied from practice, since the book specifies neither a range nor an oven.
- "MEATS" in the middle of a sentenceThat word is the running page header of the original book, caught by the scanner mid-paragraph. Read the sentence as "Rub half the pepper and 2 teaspoonfuls salt into the piece of meat."
- Which cutThree pounds of "beef" here means a braising cut: chuck, bottom round, brisket or rump. Anything from the loin will be dry and stringy after three hours in liquid.
- Graniteware panSpeckled enamel over steel or iron, a common heavy cooking vessel of the period. A Dutch oven or any lidded heavy pot is the modern equivalent; the requirement is depth, a close-fitting lid and even heat.
- Fat salt porkTwo ounces of unsmoked cured pork, belly or fatback, sold as salt pork. Blanching it a minute in boiling water tempers the salt. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon works, though it brings a cure flavour the original did not have.
- SaltThree teaspoons over three pounds of beef plus the salt pork is on the high side by current taste, especially since the pork fat is also salty. Two teaspoons rubbed into the meat and a light hand in the gravy is closer to modern seasoning.
- Browning the meatThe recipe rubs the roast with seasoning and puts it straight into the pan. Searing it in the pork fat before the vegetables go in costs five minutes and does more for the finished flavour than anything else in the method.
- The gravyTwo tablespoons of flour to 1½ pints (3 cups) of water gives a thin sauce, which is correct here — it is braising liquid, not a finished gravy. Reduce and re-thicken it after the meat comes out and rests.
- YieldThree pounds of beef serves about six, with the vegetables strained out or pureed into the sauce. The whole cloves should be fished out before serving.
Braising -- long slow cooking in a small quantity of liquid in a covered vessel -- was a standard treatment for the tougher working muscles of the steer, and household manuals of the period returned to it often. Beef of the time was generally leaner than what a supermarket sells now, which is part of why fat salt pork is laid into the pan first. The clove-and-parsley seasoning, and the flour browned in the rendered fat, are consistent with the French-derived cooking-school tradition that Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries drew on.