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Beef and Tomatoes
2 lbs. lean beef 1 bunch celery 4 onions I can tomatoes 14 package macaroni ½ lb. grated cheese Salt and pepper 1 cupful small mushrooms 1 tablespoonful soy sauce Cut the meat, celery, and onions into small pieces, then put them into a frying-pan. Set on the range and stir constantly until well browned, being careful not to scorch.
Remove from the fire, and put into a large casserole, add the tomatoes, the macaroni cooked, the cheese grated, the mushrooms, soy, salt and pepper.
Simmer for two hours and serve hot.
A straightforward braise, but the quantities as printed have suffered in transcription and need a cook's judgment before you start.
- Reading the amountsThe "14 package macaroni" stands for a quarter package; package sizes varied, so treat it as a few ounces of dry macaroni. The cheese is half a pound, as the printed page gives. The "I" characters elsewhere are the numeral 1.
- What a casserole meant hereIn this book the casserole is the lidded earthenware or fireproof china vessel itself, used on the range or in the oven. A heavy Dutch oven is the closest modern equivalent.
- A can of tomatoesA No. 2 can, a common period size, held about 20 oz, or 2½ cups. About 2½ cups of canned tomatoes is the right substitute.
- A bunch of celeryThis means a whole head, not a single rib. Trim the leaves in with the stalks — they add flavour in a long braise.
- Browning with no fat namedThe recipe assumes a greased or well-seasoned pan and beef with some fat on it. Use a tablespoon of oil, brown the beef alone in batches for colour, then add the celery and onion; crowding all three at once will steam rather than sear.
- Two hours of simmeringOn a modern burner even the lowest setting can catch tomato and cheese on the bottom. A covered pot at 325F in the oven for the two hours is steadier, and the beef will be properly tender.
- Hold the macaroni backMacaroni already cooked and then simmered two hours will disintegrate. Cook it just short of done and stir it in for the last fifteen minutes, along with the cheese, which will otherwise break and go grainy over a long simmer.
- Soy sauce in 1912The tablespoon is doing the work of a savoury seasoning, much as Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup would. Salt lightly at the start — soy and cheese both bring salt of their own.
- YieldServes six generously as a main course.
Marion Harris Neil's How to Cook in Casserole Dishes belongs to a wave of Anglo-American books published around 1910 that promoted the covered earthenware pot as a labour-saving, fuel-saving vessel for the servantless household: one dish to cook in, one dish to carry to the table. This particular recipe is a good marker of its moment. Macaroni and grated cheese had been thoroughly domesticated in American cookery by then, canned tomatoes were cheap and universal, and the tablespoon of soy sauce shows how far bottled Asian seasonings had travelled — imported soy had been sold in Britain and America since the eighteenth century as a compounding ingredient for sauces. The result is less a dish with a lineage than a demonstration of the method: cheap lean beef, a long slow simmer, and everything in one pot.