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Beef Au Gratin
Put in baking dish a layer of bread crumbs, then some thin slices of fat salt pork, slices of cold cooked beef, onion, parsley and another layer of crumbs, until the dish is full. Pour over all any left-over gravy or stock to moisten. Bake in the cooker for one hour.
A leftovers dish from the fireless-cookery chapter, which means the original assumed a piece of equipment almost nobody owns now. Everything else is straightforward layering.
- What "the cooker" wasA fireless cooker is an insulated wooden or metal box holding one or two soapstone or cast-iron discs that were heated red-hot on the range, then sealed in with the food. It cooks by stored heat that falls steadily over an hour or two, so nothing browns and nothing boils hard.
- Oven substituteCovered, in a moderate oven at 350F, this needs about 45 minutes to an hour for a 1 1/2-quart dish. Uncover for the last 10 minutes so the top crumbs colour, which is the whole point of "au gratin" and the one thing the fireless cooker could never do.
- The salt pork is the hingeIt goes in raw and it is the only uncooked meat in the dish, so the layers must actually get hot rather than merely warm. Slice it very thin, no more than 1/8 inch, and spread it through the layers rather than banking it in one seam.
- Salt pork itselfFat salt pork is salt-cured side or belly pork, sold in slabs and much saltier than bacon. Sliced thinly it renders and bastes the crumbs; unsmoked pancetta or plain streaky bacon is the nearest common stand-in. Add no salt to the dish until you have tasted it.
- CrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, coarse rather than powdery. Fresh soft crumbs or fine commercial crumbs turn to paste under the gravy and you lose the layered texture.
- Onion and parsleyAn hour of gentle heat may not fully soften onion cut in thick rings. Slice it paper-thin or sweat it in the pork fat first, and chop the parsley rather than laying in sprigs.
- How much liquid"To moisten" means about 1 to 1 1/2 cups for a 1 1/2-quart dish: enough to dampen every crumb layer, not enough to float them. If you have no gravy, well-seasoned beef stock with a spoonful of flour cooked into it does the same job.
- YieldAbout a pound of cold beef in a 1 1/2-quart dish serves four with a green vegetable.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1905 and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period routinely gave it its own chapter. The appeal was fuel: heat two soapstones on the range, shut them in an insulated box with the dish, and dinner cooked itself while the fire went out — useful in summer, and pressed as a patriotic economy during the First World War. The recipe itself belongs to the older tradition of scalloped or gratinated leftovers, where cold roast beef, breadcrumbs and yesterday's gravy are rebuilt into a second meal; au gratin refers to the browned crust, from the French for the crisp scrapings left in the pan. That a fireless cooker cannot brown anything is a small contradiction the book lets pass, and a fair sign of how eagerly the method was applied to dishes it did not really suit.