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Réchauffé of Beef
Some slices of cold roast 3 tablespoonfuls red currant beef, rare if possible jelly I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter 1 wineglassful sherry wine Salt and red pepper to taste Melt the butter and red currant jelly in a casserole, then add the wine and the seasonings.
When thoroughly hot, add the beef cut in small, neat, rather thick slices. Heat it through, but do not let it boil.
A sauce built in three ingredients, meant to warm yesterday's roast without cooking it a second time. The ingredient list has been run together by the original two-column typesetting; read it as slices of cold rare roast beef, 3 tablespoons red currant jelly, 1 oz butter, 1 wineglass sherry, salt and red pepper.
- Do not let it boilThe whole point of a réchauffé is that the meat is only brought up to temperature. A simmer will drive the beef past well done, squeeze out its juices and leave it grey and stringy. Keep the pan below a bubble and give the slices only the few minutes they need to warm through.
- "Casserole" hereThe vessel is used directly over the heat, not as a baking dish: the butter and jelly are melted in it. Any heavy flameproof pan or small Dutch oven does the same job; the mass of the pan is what keeps the sauce from scorching.
- A wineglassfulIn early twentieth-century English cookery a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Use a dry or medium sherry (fino or amontillado); cream sherry will push the sauce, already sweetened with jelly, over into dessert territory.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A pinch is enough — it is there to cut the currant jelly, which otherwise dominates.
- Getting the sauce rightMelt butter and jelly together over low heat and whisk until smooth before the sherry goes in, or the jelly stays in lumps. If the sauce looks thin after the wine, let it reduce a minute or two before the beef goes in, since you cannot reduce it afterwards.
- Choice of beefThe recipe asks for rare beef "if possible," and rare is the better choice: meat already cooked through has nothing left to lose. Cut slices thick — a quarter inch or more — so they warm without overcooking at the edges.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much beef; the sauce is a modest amount and will coat perhaps a pound of slices, enough for a light lunch for two or so. Serve on toast, or with plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Rìhauffé is simply the French past participle of réchauffer, to reheat, and British and American cookbooks of the period used it as a polite euphemism for leftovers — an entire genre of "cold meat cookery" existed because a Sunday joint was expected to feed a household for several days. The currant-jelly-and-sherry treatment belongs to the same family as Cumberland sauce and the sweet-sharp gravies traditionally served with venison and mutton, where fruit jelly stands in for the older medieval habit of sweetening and spicing meat sauces.