Beef au Gratin
Cut into very thin slices sufficient cold cooked beef to serve six persons. Peel 2 large Spanish onions and cut in the thinnest of slices. In a heavy granite pan melt 2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add the onions and cook over a slow fire, shaking gently from time to time, until they are golden brown. Sprinkle into the butter 2 teaspoonfuls of flour and cook until lightly colored, add gradually 1 pint of clear beef stock, stirring at first very briskly, that the flour may not lump.
Add 1 tablespoonful of tomato catsup and let all come to a gentle simmer. Have ready a deep baking dish which can be sent to the table. In it place alternate layers of the onions, sauce and beef. Cover with ½ cupful of fine stale bread crumbs mixed with 1 tablespoonful of melted butter and brown in a quick oven. Serve at once.
A leftovers dish built on browned onions and a quick brown sauce, and it stands or falls on how far you take the onions. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: brown the onions properly"Golden brown" over a slow fire means 25-40 minutes of patient cooking, not the 5 minutes that gets onions merely soft. This is the only real seasoning in the dish apart from the catsup, so undercooked onions leave it flat.
- "Quick oven"Usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F, though period sources vary. The filling is already hot and cooked; the oven is only there to crisp and colour the crumb topping, which takes 10-15 minutes. Watch it rather than timing it.
- Granite panGranite ware is enamelled steel, common in period kitchens. Any heavy skillet works; avoid bare cast iron if your stock is very tomato-forward, though a single tablespoon of catsup is unlikely to matter.
- A pint of stockAmerican measure, so 2 cups. With only 2 teaspoons of flour this makes a thin, gravy-like sauce rather than a thick one, which is correct here — it should soak the beef, not bind it.
- Spanish onionsLarge, mild, pale-skinned onions. Two large ones is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb once peeled, which looks like far too much until they collapse in the pan.
- The beefCold roast or braised beef, sliced as thinly as you can manage — chilling it firm first makes this much easier. It is already cooked, so the oven should not be long enough to dry it out.
- Stale crumbsDry breadcrumbs from day-old bread, ground fine as the recipe asks, rather than fresh soft crumbs, which go pasty. Toss thoroughly with the melted butter so every crumb colours.
- Yield and servingSix as written, though closer to four if it is the main course rather than one dish among several. Something acidic alongside — pickles, a sharp salad — balances the sweetness of the onions.
Au gratin in its older sense means only the browned crust, from the French gratter, to scrape — originally the crusty scrapings from the dish, long before the phrase came to imply cheese in English-speaking kitchens. There is no cheese here at all, just buttered crumbs, which is closer to the term's original meaning than most modern usage. Dishes like this are the backbone of an economical cookbook: a Sunday joint reappearing on Tuesday, stretched with cheap onions and a flour-thickened sauce, and disguised well enough that no one at the table need call it leftovers. The tablespoon of tomato catsup is a period marker of its own — bottled catsup was by then a standard pantry staple used the way a cook today might reach for Worcestershire or tomato paste, a shot of sweet acidity to lift a plain brown sauce.