Meats: English
London Meat Pie (English recipe). 1 pound steak, + pound kidney, 2 cupfuls flour, 6 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, Pinch salt, 1 cupful milk.
Cut the steak and kidney in thin slices, and sprinkle over it flour, pepper, and salt. Put in a pie dish with a little hot water. Put the flour in a basin with the baking powder and salt, rub in the butter, and add milk.
Turn on a floured board, and roll a quarter of an inch in thickness. Wet the edges of the pie dish, and line it with strips of pastry, then cover, brush over with egg, make a hole in the center, and bake for an hour and a half in a moderately hot oven.
Steak Pudding (English recipe). 2 cupfuls flour, 3 ounces suet, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, 1 cupful milk, Salt and pepper 1 pound steak, cupful hot water, Seasoning.
Cut the meat in slices, and dip each piece in seasoning. Cover with hot water, and let stand while making the pastry. Mix the flour with the suet finely chopped, the baking powder and salt, and make into a stiff paste with milk. Drop on a floured board, and roll. Line a greased pudding basin with the pastry, reserving a piece for the top. Put in the meat and water, wet the edges, and cover with the remainder of the pastry. Tie over the top a floured pudding cloth. Put into a saucepan of boiling water to boil two hours.
Beef Bouilli (French recipe).
Short ribs beef, 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 1 onion, 3 stalks celery, 1 clove garlic, Pepper and salt, 1 tablespoonful vinegar, 1 teaspoonful mushroom catsup.
Put the beef on to stew with turnip, carrot, onion, celery, garlic, salt and pepper. Cover with boiling water, and simmer till the meat is tender as possible. For sauce, add vinegar, mushroom catsup, salt, and Simmer a few minutes. pepper.
Serve the sauce about the meat.
Beef à la Mode. 4 pounds beef, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 3 pints boiling water, 1 bay leaf, 1 sprig celery, 1 sprig parsley, 1 onion, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, 1 tablespoonful salt, Dash pepper.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Put the butter in a stewpan over a hot fire; when it melts, brown the meat on both sides. Remove the meat temporarily and add flour to butter; let it brown and thicken, then add water, bay leaf, celery, parsley, and onion with clove stuck in it, carrots, turnip, salt, and pepper. Replace the meat in this liquid and simmer DOTTII a 6 a. Mold for Lady's Fingers; b, Mold for Steamed Puddings, Brown Bread, or Parfait: c, Layer- Cake Tin; d, Doughnut Cutter. six hours. Turn the meat over and stir occasionally. Place the meat on a platter, strain the gravy over it, and garnish with sliced boiled carrots and parsley.
Beef Goulash (Hungarian recipe). 3 pounds round steak cut in inch cubes, 8 onions sliced, 3 potatoes diced, cupful butter, cupful water, 1 cupful cream, teaspoonful beef extract, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful black pepper, teaspoonful paprika.
Put the butter in a kettle, set it on the range, and fry the onions, add the meat, cook until brown. Dissolve the beef extract in water, and add it to the contents of the kettle. Cover closely, and cook slowly until the meat is tender, then add the seasonings, and place the potatoes in the kettle on top of the meat. Cover and cook until the potatoes are tender, add the cream, and simmer five minutes.
Flank à la Milanaise (French rec ipe). 2 pounds flank, 1 tablespoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, cupful chopped onion, 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 ounces suet, 1 cupful water, 2 slices carrot, 1 tablespoonful cornstarch.
Season flank with salt and pepper.
Place a saucepan with onion and butter over the fire, add a small piece of bruised garlic, cook five minutes.
When cold, spread this over the meat, roll, tie at each end and in the center with a string. Set a saucepan with suet over the fire, fry until the suet is fried out; then put in the meat; cook and turn till the meat becomes a light brown, add water, carrot, and onion; cover and cook till done, which will take about two hours, adding more water if necessary, but only cupful at a time. Shortly before serving, lay the meat on a hot dish, take off the strings, skim the fat from the gravy, mix cornstarch with cold water, add it to the gravy, stir, and cook two minutes; add sufficient boiling water to make a creamy sauce, cook five minutes, strain, and serve.
Beef Ragout (French recipe). 2 pounds lean beef, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 onions.
Cut the beef into one-and-a-halfinch pieces, season with salt and pepper. Place a saucepan with butter and onions over the fire, cook a few minutes, add the meat and seasoning, cover, and cook over a slow fire two and a half hours, adding a little boiling water if the gravy gets too brown. When the meat is tender, dust with 1 tablespoonful flour, add cupful boiling water, and cook slowly ten minutes. Hot Collops (Scotch recipe).
MEATS Mince 1½ pounds round steak fine and season highly. An onion can be added if liked, chopped very fine.
Melt a tablespoonful butter in a stewpan, put in the mince, and stir frequently to keep from getting into lumps. Dredge flour over it, and pour on a little stock. Let simmer a few minutes, serve very hot on slices of toast.
Boiled Tongue.
Bend the tip of the tongue around and tie it to the root. Put it in cold water and place over the fire. When it boils, pour off the water, and put it on again in cold water. Boil until tender. Remove the skin, roots, and fat, and serve cold. Tongues may also be braised and served cold.- MARY J. LINCOLN.
Sweetbreads and Macaroni Sauce. 2 beef sweetbreads, 12 sticks macaroni, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cupful cream, Salt and pepper.
Parboil the sweetbreads, cut into small pieces. Boil the macaroni; when tender, cut it in tiny pieces, making little rings. Into a saucepan put butter and flour; stir, add the cream; when smooth, add the macaroni and sweetbreads. Season with salt and pepper. Boil up and serve.
A run of nine beef, tongue and sweetbread dishes gathered as "English" and continental cookery for an American kitchen around 1900. The methods hold up; the measurements and a few ingredients need translating.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing: the kidney for the London pie, the butter and water for the goulash, the beef extract, salt, pepper and paprika amounts, and the hot water in the steak pudding, flank and ragout. For the pie, a quarter to half a pound of kidney to a pound of steak is a common English proportion. For the goulash, half a cup butter, half a cup water and about a teaspoon each of extract, salt and paprika, with less black pepper, are plausible readings rather than recoverable ones.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a heavily advertised American double-acting powder. Brand names embedded in ingredient lists of this period often point to a commercial tie-in, though the page itself does not prove one. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes measure for measure.
- "Moderately hot oven"For the London meat pie, 375-400F. The long hour and a half is not for the crust but for the sliced steak underneath, which needs that time in its own liquor to become tender.
- Steak pudding basinA pudding basin is a straight-sided ceramic bowl of about 1.5 quarts. Grease it well, and tie the floured cloth on loosely enough that the suet crust can rise. Keep the water at a steady boil halfway up the basin and top it up from a kettle so it never goes dry over the two hours.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold shredded in Britain and available frozen or from a butcher elsewhere. Frozen grated butter gives a passable crust but a softer one; vegetable shortening also works.
- Kidney preparationBeef kidney needs the white core cut out and an hour's soak in cold salted water or milk before slicing, or the pie will taste strongly of ammonia. The recipe assumes a cook who already knew this.
- Mushroom catsupThe seasoning in the bouilli is not tomato ketchup but a thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, still sold by British grocers. A teaspoon of Worcestershire or a dash of soy plus a little mushroom powder covers the same ground.
- SweetbreadsBeef sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or young steer; order ahead from a butcher. Soak two hours in several changes of cold water, parboil fifteen minutes, then plunge into ice water and peel away the membrane before cutting up. Twelve "sticks" of macaroni means twelve lengths of the long hollow tubes in which macaroni was then sold, not elbows; the weight depends on how long the sticks are.
- Beef a la mode timingSix hours of simmering suits a tough 4-pound pot roast on a range that was slow and awkward to regulate. On a modern burner or in a 300F oven, three to four hours will do it; check at three.
- YieldsNone are given. On modern portions the pie and the pudding would each serve about four, the goulash and the a la mode six to eight, and the ragout and the flank about four.
The two English entries preserve a real distinction that has largely collapsed in American cooking: a pie is baked under pastry in the oven, a pudding is lined with suet crust and boiled in a cloth-tied basin for hours, which produces a soft, gravy-soaked casing rather than a crisp one. Steak and kidney in both forms is generally traced to nineteenth-century English chophouse and household cookery, kidney being cheap offal that lent depth to a modest amount of steak. The presence of a named brand of baking powder inside the ingredient lists, and the attribution to Mary J. Lincoln, are consistent with a compiled American household book of the sort assembled around 1900 from contributed recipes, cookery-school authorities and, often, commercial sponsorship, with "English," "French," "Hungarian" and "Scotch" labels serving to signal cosmopolitan range.