Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Beef Stew with Vegetables
Beef Stew with Vegetables
2 lbs. lean beef from round, or 2 1/2 lbs. if there is a bone salt and pepper 1 quart water 1/2 cup carrots, cut in 1/2 inch cubes 1/2 cup turnips, cut in 1/2 inch cubes 1/2 small onion, cut in thin slices 2 cups potatoes, cut in 1/4 inch slices 3 tablespoons flour Wipe meat with wet cloth; separate meat, bone and fat. Fry out some of the fat in a frying pan, cut meat into 1 1/2 inch cubes, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. Sear the meat in the hot fat, stirring constantly. When all surfaces are well browned, put in the kettle, cover and let boil up once, skim and then simmer for 2 1/2 hours. Add carrots, turnips and onion the last hour of cooking. Parboil the potatoes and add to stew 15 minutes before taking from fire. Remove bone, large pieces of fat and skin. Thicken with three tablespoons flour diluted with enough water to pour easily. Let the stew come to the boil again and cook 10 minutes. Mutton, lamb or veal can be cooked in this manner. When veal is used, try out two slices of pork, as there will not be much fat on the meat. Lamb and mutton should have some of the fat put aside and butter substituted. Serves 6.
A plain braise of the sort that anchored weekday menu plans a century ago. Nothing here is obscure, but a few of the working details are assumed rather than stated.
- The kettle and the water"Kettle" here means a heavy lidded pot, not a tea kettle. The quart of water listed goes in with the seared meat; scrape the browned fond from the frying pan into it so none of the searing is wasted.
- Keep it below a boilThe recipe brings it up once, then simmers 2 1/2 hours. Round is lean and full of connective tissue; a hard rolling boil tends to leave the cubes stringy, while bare surface movement, roughly 180-190F, gives a more tender result.
- Flour is used twiceThe dredging flour is unmeasured — a light coating on the cubes, perhaps 2 tablespoons in practice. The 3 tablespoons at the end are separate, and should be shaken or whisked with cold water to a smooth cream before going in, or it will lump.
- Vegetable timingCarrots and turnips in for the final hour is generous by modern taste; 30 to 40 minutes gives cubes that hold their shape. The recipe gives no reason for parboiling the potatoes separately and adding them only 15 minutes before the end, though it does keep them from breaking up into the broth.
- TurnipsProbably the white turnip rather than swede or rutabaga, though books of this period used "turnip" for both and this one does not specify. White turnip cooks faster and tastes sharper and lighter; swede will want the full hour and will sweeten the pot noticeably.
- Rendering the fat"Fry out some of the fat" means dicing the trimmed beef fat and melting it over low heat until the solids are crisp, then searing in the liquid fat. Any neutral oil or beef dripping does the same job if the meat comes trimmed.
- The variationsVeal carries almost no fat of its own, which is presumably why the recipe has you try out two slices of pork; lamb and mutton carry a good deal, and the direction to set some of that fat aside and substitute butter fits the strong, waxy character of mutton fat as the dish cools.
- YieldSix servings as stated, and it improves overnight — chill it and lift the set fat from the surface before reheating.
Beef stew of this kind was a workhorse of American household cookery in the earlier twentieth century: round is a cheap cut, root vegetables kept in a cellar all winter, and a single pot could sit on low heat while other work got done. The method -- dredge, sear, simmer long, thicken at the end with a flour slurry -- is the one taught in nineteenth-century domestic-science cookery, where browning was commonly explained as sealing in the juices. That explanation has since been abandoned (searing builds flavour through the Maillard reaction, it does not seal anything), but the technique survived because the result tastes better. The note that mutton, lamb or veal can be handled the same way reflects a habit of these books: one master method, several proteins.