Home › Some Kitchen Kinks › Some Kitchen Kinks: Cover
Some Kitchen Kinks: Cover
Cover the heart with water and simmer until tender or boil ten minutes and set in the fireless cooker for six or eight hours. Remove from the water about one-half hour before serving. Dredge with flour, pepper, and salt, or sprinkle with crumbs and bake until brown.
Braised Beef, Pot Roast, and Beef à la Mode.
The above names are given to dishes made from the less tender cuts of meat. They vary little either in composition or method of preparation. In all cases the meat is browned on the outside to increase the flavor and then cooked in a small amount of water in a closely covered kettle or other receptacle until tender. The flavor of the dish is secured by browning the meat and by the addition of the seasoning vegetables. Many recipes suggest that the vegetables be removed before serving and the liquid be thickened.
As the vegetables are usually extremely well seasoned by means of the browned fat and the extracts of the meat, it seems unfortunate not to serve them.
Of course, the kind, quality, and shape of the meat all play their part in the matter. Extra time is needed for meats with a good deal of sinew and tough fibers such as the tough steaks, shank cuts, etc.; and naturally a fillet of beef, or a steak from a prime cut, will take less time than a thick piece from the shin. Such dishes require more time and perhaps more skill in their preparation and may involve more expense for fuel than the more costly cuts, which like chops or tender steaks may be quickly cooked, but to the epicure, as well as to the average man, they are palatable when rightly prepared.
Bean-pot Roast. . 3 pounds mutton (shoulder), or 3 pounds round, or chuck steak. 1 cup carrots cut into small pieces. 1 cup potatoes cut into small pieces. 1/4 cup sliced onion.
Cover the meat with boiling water.
Place the cover on the bean pot and let the meat cook in a moderate oven for two hours; then add the vegetables cut in half-inch cubes, with 2 teaspoonfuls salt; cook until the vegetables are tender, which will require about one hour; then serve, pouring a sauce over the meat, made from 1 cup of the liquid in which the meat was cooked, thickened with 2 tablespoonsful of flour. Hungarian Goulash. 2 pounds top round of beef.
A little flour. 2 ounces salt pork. 2 cups tomatoes. 1 stalk celery. 1 onion. 2 bay leaves. 6 whole cloves. 6 peppercorns. 1 blade mace.
Cut the beef into 2-inch pieces and sprinkle with flour; fry the salt pork until light brown; add the beef and cook slowly for about thirty-five APPENDIX minutes, stirring occasionally. Cover with water and simmer about two hours; season with salt and pepper or paprika.
From the vegetables and spices a sauce is made as follows: Cook in sufficient water to cover for twenty minutes; then rub through a sieve, and add to some of the stock in which the meat was cooked. Thicken with flour, using 2 tablespoonsful (moistened with cold water) to each cup of liquid, and season with salt and paprika.
Serve the meat on a platter with the sauce poured over it. Potatoes, carrots, and green peppers cooked until tender, and cut into small pieces or narrow strips, are usually sprinkled over the dish when served, and noodles may be arranged in a border upon the platter.
Goulash is a Hungarian dish which has come to be a favorite in the United States.
Three braises and a short essay on cheap cuts, written when a coal range and a hay-box were standard equipment. The method holds up; the vessels and one of the timings do not.
- The fireless cooker instructionA fireless cooker is an insulated box: food is boiled, then sealed in to coast down over hours. Ten minutes at a boil is not enough to make the meat safe, and over six to eight hours of unmonitored cooling the temperature will fall below 140F well before the end, into the range where Clostridium perfringens spores germinate. Ignore that option and use the first one ender, roggher, roughly 2 to 3 hours for a heart this size — or a modern slow cooker held on low.
- Moderate oven350F for the bean-pot roast. The pot is covered and full of liquid, so anything from 325F to 350F behaves the same; the meat is done when a fork twists free, not when the clock says three hours.
- Bean potThe narrow-necked glazed stoneware crock traps steam better than a wide vessel. A Dutch oven with a tight lid does the same job. Do not put unglazed or antique glazed stoneware of unknown origin into service — old glazes can carry lead.
- Browning is the hingeThe text says it outright and it is worth repeating: the flavor comes from browning. The goulash's "cook slowly for about thirty-five minutes, stirring occasionally" means developing colour on the floured beef in the pork fat, not gently stewing it. Work in batches so the pan stays dry enough to brown.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as flat "blades" or ground. A blade is usually reckoned at roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace; add it with the other spices, and the sieving step will hold it back, so it will not need fishing out.
- Goulash without paprikaTwo cups of tomato, cloves and mace, and paprika mentioned only as an alternative to pepper — this is an American adaptation, not Hungarian gulyás, which is built on sweet paprika stirred off the heat. If you want the Hungarian flavour, add two tablespoons of sweet paprika to the onions after the pan comes off the burner, since paprika turns bitter if it is allowed to scorch in hot fat.
- Thickening ratioTwo tablespoons of flour slaked in cold water per cup of liquid gives a thick, old-fashioned gravy. One tablespoon per cup is closer to modern taste for a sauce poured over meat.
- Salt porkTwo ounces of salt pork is a rendering fat and a seasoning. Salt pork is salty enough to matter, so taste before adding the recipe's salt. Bacon or a neutral oil plus a pinch of salt will substitute.
- YieldThe bean-pot roast on three pounds of shoulder or chuck serves six; the goulash on two pounds of round serves four to six with the noodle border.
The chapter is an argument as much as a set of recipes: it exists to persuade households that shank, chuck and shoulder repay long moist cooking, and that the vegetables cooked alongside are too well seasoned to throw away. That reasoning belonged to the domestic-science movement of the early twentieth century, which pushed cheaper protein on nutritional and economic grounds and had to overcome the assumption that a good dinner meant a roast from a prime cut. The fireless cooker in the first line is the same impulse applied to fuel: an insulated box that finished the cooking after the stove was let out, widely promoted in wartime and thrift literature of the period. "Beef Anglicisation" aside, "Beef à la Mode" is an Anglicisation of French boeuf à la mode, larded and braised, and English versions of the name appear in cookery books by the early eighteenth century and arguably earlier. Goulash is the newcomer here, and the note that it "has come to be a favorite in the United States" reflects central European immigration; the version given, thickened with flour and spiced with clove and mace, has drifted a long way from the paprika stew of the Hungarian plain.