Home › Cookery › To Stew a Rump of Beef
To Stew a Rump of Beef
Stuff the beef with shallots, thyme, parsley, chopped fine, slips of bacon, pepper, salt and allspice. Then lay it in a pot with water sufficient to keep it from burning before it is done.
Thicken the gravy with burnt flour and butter, and when it is served up, pour a little wine over it and strew the top with allspice.--Mrs. M.P.
This is an English-style braise carried into Virginia practice: a big lean cut, larded and stuffed with aromatics, cooked slowly in very little liquid. Almost everything depends on keeping the pot at a bare simmer rather than a boil.
- The hinge: barely simmer"Water sufficient to keep it from burning" means a shallow braise, not a soup. Use only enough liquid to protect the bottom of the pot, and keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, or the outside shreds while the centre stays tough. A large piece will want several hours, covered, until a fork turns easily in the thickest part.
- What a rump wasA nineteenth-century butcher's rump of beef was a large primal piece, considerably bigger than a modern supermarket roast and frequently sold on the bone. The modern equivalents are a boneless rump roast, bottom round or a chuck roast; chuck has more collagen and gives a better result in a long stew.
- Stuffing and lardingThe "slips of bacon" are lardons pushed into slits cut with a thin knife, along with the chopped herbs, and they exist to baste a very lean cut from inside. Cut the pockets deep and space them evenly; a few large ones do less good than a dozen small.
- ShallotsIn Virginia cookbooks of this period "shallots" frequently means green onions or the small multiplier onions grown in kitchen gardens, not the French shallot of a modern produce aisle. Either works here; use about half a cup, finely chopped.
- Burnt flourBrowned flour, a standard nineteenth-century thickener: dry flour stirred in a heavy pan over moderate heat until it is the colour of cinnamon. Browning weakens its thickening power, so you need appreciably more of it than raw flour -- about 3 tablespoons browned flour worked into 2 tablespoons butter for a quart of gravy.
- The wine and allspice finishThe wine goes in off the heat, so it stays sharp against the long-cooked gravy; the recipe asks only for "a little," so a few tablespoons of Madeira, sherry or dry red is in keeping. Ground allspice strewn at the table will taste raw and dusty in quantity, so use a light hand, or steep whole berries in the braise and skip the garnish.
- YieldFigure about 6 oz of cooked meat per person; a 5 lb roast serves eight to ten with the gravy over rice or potatoes.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from more than two hundred Southern housekeepers, which is why so many entries close with a set of initials like "Mrs. M.P." rather than a name. The dish itself is older than the book and thoroughly English: stewed rumps of beef, larded and stuffed with herbs and bacon, appear in eighteenth-century English manuals such as Hannah Glasse's, and Virginia cooks inherited the form along with much of the rest of their gentry cookery. Browned flour as a thickener and a splash of Madeira or sherry at the moment of serving are both period markers, the first a way of getting colour and a toasted flavour into gravy before commercial browning sauces, the second a reminder of how much fortified wine moved through Atlantic ports into Southern kitchens.