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Beef with Currant Jelly Sauce
Make a brown sauce; add one cup currant jelly and twelve thin slices rare roast beef. Cook until hot and serve.
Three lines of instruction that assume you already know how to make a brown sauce and already have Sunday's roast in the icebox. The whole point is speed at the table, so everything hinges on not cooking the beef a second time.
- The brown saucePeriod brown sauce means a roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, moistened with beef stock and simmered until it coats a spoon — roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups stock. A good jarred demi-glace or a reduced beef stock thickened with beurre manie stands in without apology.
- A cup of jelly is a lotOne cup of currant jelly to the modest quantity of sauce implied here gives something closer to a glaze than a gravy, and commercial jellies today are often sweeter than a tart homemade one would have been. Start with half a cup, taste, and add the rest only if you want it. A teaspoon of sherry vinegar or a spoonful of Dijon pulls it back from candy.
- Do not cook the beefThe recipe says only 'cook until hot'; rare beef left in simmering sauce will quickly go grey and stringy. Bring the sauce hot, kill the flame or slide the pan off direct heat, then lay the slices in and turn them just until warmed through. They should still be pink.
- Slice thin, and coldSlice thin -- The recipe asks only for twelve thin slices of rare roast beef. Cold beef slices cleanly; warm beef tears, so a chilled roast is easier to carve thin. Twelve thin slices will come to something under a pound of meat.
- The chafing dishThis belongs to the chafing-dish chapter, i.e. a spirit lamp at the table, which delivers gentle, uneven heat — exactly right here. In a modern kitchen use a wide skillet over low heat, or set the blazer over the hot-water pan if your chafing dish has one, which makes overcooking much harder.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; twelve slices would stretch to four as a supper dish, two or three as a main. Buttered toast points or a split biscuit catch the sauce; mashed potato works as well.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and it ranged far beyond the sponsor's product into a full domestic manual. Its "Chafing Dish Delicacies" chapter belongs squarely to the American chafing-dish vogue of the 1890s and 1900s, when the spirit-lamp pan was the fashionable equipment for late suppers, bachelor entertaining and after-theatre parties — cooking performed in the parlour rather than sent up from the kitchen. Dishes of this kind reheat or lightly cook something already prepared, because a spirit lamp cannot do much else. The pairing of red currant jelly with beef and game is much older, generally traced to the English tradition that also produced Cumberland sauce, and it survived in American cooking well into the twentieth century as one way to use up a cold roast without serving it plain.