Stewed Beef
Cut beef taken from the round in small squares; cover with boiling water, and simmer until meat is tender, four or six hours. Season with salt and pepper one hour before serving. Remove meat and thicken liquid, allowing one and one half tablespoons of flour for each pint of liquid.
A plainly written water stew with no aromatics at all, typical of turn-of-the-century American economy cookery. A few adjustments bring it in line with modern practice.
- The cut"Beef taken from the round" is lean and sinewy; today's bottom round or eye of round behaves the same way. Chuck gives a juicier result if you would rather not fight the leanness, though it will not match the original.
- Cut size"Small squares" is not defined in the original. Something in the range of 1 to 1 1/2 inch cubes works; much smaller and a long simmer reduces them to threads.
- TimeFour to six hours is far longer than round needs. Cubed round is fork-tender in about 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; the original's wide window may reflect variable stove heat, but the book does not say.
- Simmer, do not boilThis is the hinge. Water at a full boil squeezes lean beef tight and dry no matter how long it cooks. Keep the surface barely trembling, lid ajar.
- Salting lateThe instruction to season an hour before serving reflects an older belief that early salt toughens meat. Salting at the start seasons the beef through and does no harm; if you follow the original, taste again at the end.
- ThickeningOne and a half tablespoons of flour per pint of liquid gives a light gravy. Slake the flour in cold water or work it into an equal weight of butter before adding, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- FlavorThe recipe calls for nothing but water, salt, and pepper. An onion, a bay leaf, or beef stock in place of the water is an obvious improvement and changes nothing structural.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a working guide, 2 lb of beef will serve four, yielding roughly a pint of gravy after thickening.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other brand-sponsored cookbooks of the era it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a complete general cookery course so the volume would earn a permanent place in the kitchen. That may account for the flatness of an entry like this one: the meat chapter exists to be useful and comprehensive, not distinctive. The recipe's instruction to season only an hour before serving is consistent with a widely repeated assumption of the period, that salt added early would draw out the juices and toughen the fibers -- an idea that appeared across American household manuals for decades before later testing undercut it.