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Beef Chauffé
Slices of cold roast beef 1 tablespoon butter 3 tablespoons jelly Salt and red pepper 1/4 cup water Melt the butter; add the jelly, seasonings, water and beef. Cover and cook until the beef is thoroughly hot.
A chafing-dish way of turning Sunday's roast into a hot supper dish, built on the old pairing of beef and tart red jelly. The whole thing takes about five minutes once the butter melts.
- The hinge: gentle heat onlyAlready-cooked beef needs to be warmed through, not cooked again. Keep the pan at a bare simmer and pull it as soon as the slices are hot; a rolling boil will tighten the fibres and leave them grey and dry.
- "Jelly" means currant jelly"Jelly" most likely means currant jelly -- in books of this vintage an unqualified "jelly" in a meat sauce is usually red currant, though the recipe does not say so. Redcurrant jelly is still sold; tart apple or crab-apple jelly works on the same principle. Avoid a sweet grape or berry jam, which lacks the acidity that makes the sauce read as savoury.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch is enough for this quantity; it is there to cut the sugar in the jelly.
- The chafing dishThe pan -- The recipe specifies no equipment. If it is worked in a chafing dish, it would be the blazer pan set directly over the flame rather than over the hot-water pan. Any small heavy skillet or saucepan on a low burner does the same job.
- Cut the beef thinSlices about an eighth of an inch thick heat evenly and take up the sauce. Thick chunks will still be cool at the centre by the time the outside has stiffened.
- Quantities and yieldQuantities -- The recipe gives no weight of beef, so the yield is open. The sauce comes to roughly half a cup, meant to gloss the meat rather than pool around it; if it reduces too far before the beef is hot, add water a spoonful at a time.
- ServingToast points or plain boiled rice suit it, with the pan brought to the table. Note that the recipe adds the seasonings along with the jelly rather than at the end; taste before serving, since jellies vary in sweetness.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households between the 1890s and the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period routinely gave it a chapter of its own. The appeal was partly social — the pan was worked at the table, at supper parties and in college rooms and bachelor lodgings where there was a spirit lamp but no stove — and partly thrifty, since a good many of the recipes exist to make something of food already cooked, though plenty of others (rarebits, Newburgs, eggs, oysters) start from raw ingredients. "Chauffé" is borrowed for a bit of menu polish, and the beef-and-currant-jelly combination it dresses up is much older than the chafing dish: tart fruit jellies were the standard English accompaniment to red meat and game long before anyone thought to melt them into a sauce.