Meats: Cook
Cover the pan and set in a very moderate oven. Cook for five hours, basting every half hour with the gravy in the pan. The oven must never be so hot that the gravy will bubble.-MARIA PARLOA.
Beef Stew with Dumplings. 2 pounds upper part of round steak with the bone, 3 pints boiling water, 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 1 onion, tablespoonful salt, tablespoonful pepper, bay leaf, cupful flour for thickening.
Cut meat in one-and-a-half inch pieces, wipe with a damp cloth, and sprinkle with a little salt and flour.
Put some of the fat in a hot frying pan, and when tried out, add meat, turning often, till well browned.
Then put in a kettle with the bones, add boiling water, rinsing out frying pan with some of it, that none of the goodness of the meat be wasted. Let meat boil for five minutes; then set back on the stove where water will just bubble, and cook slowly for two hours. Then add onion, carrot, and turnip which have been cut in halfinch cubes, and cook for another hour. Twelve minutes before the stew is done, put dumplings on a perforated tin pie plate, or in a steamer, cover closely, and do not lift the cover until stew is cooked.
Two items run together here: the tail end of a slow-roasted beef dish credited to Maria Parloa, and a full beef stew with steamed dumplings. Both hinge on heat kept low enough that the liquid never truly boils.
- "Very moderate oven"Oven terms in these books are not standardised, but this is at the low end: somewhere in the region of 250-300F. The instruction that the gravy must never bubble is the governing one, so watch the pot rather than the dial and drop the heat if the liquid begins to simmer.
- The stew's real temperature"Set back on the stove where water will just bubble" means a bare simmer, around 180-190F, with only occasional lazy bubbles. A rolling boil for two hours squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat in a cloudy broth.
- The pepperA tablespoonful of pepper against a tablespoonful of salt for two pounds of meat may be a printer's slip, or simply a very assertive palate. A teaspoon of black pepper is nearer modern proportion; the tablespoon of salt is reasonable for three pints of liquid.
- "Upper part of round steak with the bone"Bone-in round is rare at a modern counter. Use 2 lb boneless bottom round or chuck and add a beef marrow bone or two, or a split short rib, for the gelatin the original bone supplied.
- Flour for thickeningThe cupful is listed "for thickening", with a little more used to dust the meat; do not put a whole cup into the pot. Dredge the cubes lightly, and if you want the gravy thickened, whisk 3-4 tablespoons with cold water into a slurry and stir it into the simmering pot for a few minutes -- the method as printed gives no thickening step at all.
- "When tried out"Rendered, that is: cook the trimmed beef fat in the pan until the liquid fat runs and the solids shrink. Any neutral oil or a spoon of beef tallow does the same job.
- The dumplingsNo dumpling recipe is given on this page. Any standard baking-powder dumpling dough works; the crucial part is that they steam above the stew, not in it, and the lid stays down for the full twelve minutes. Lifting it drops the steam and collapses them.
- Vegetable timingAn hour of simmering leaves half-inch turnip and carrot cubes very soft, and they may start to break up. Twenty-five to thirty minutes is enough if you want them intact; add them accordingly and let the meat have its remaining time alone.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat with three pints of liquid and dumplings serves four to six as a main course.
Maria Parloa, whose name closes the first recipe here, ran a cooking school in Boston in the 1870s and was among the founding teachers of what became the Boston Cooking School tradition later carried on by Fannie Farmer; her books and her later pamphlet work for food companies made her one of the most widely reprinted American cookery authorities of the century, which is why a compilation of this kind lifts her by name. The stew that follows is a thoroughly ordinary piece of nineteenth-century domestic economy: round is a working cut, the bone goes in the pot, and the frying pan is rinsed out with the cooking water so that nothing browned is wasted. The dumpling is steamed above the stew rather than dropped into it, and it depends on chemical leavening hrough households in the second half of the century.