Guiso
1 small round steak 1 tablespoon drippings 4 tablespoons boiled rice 2 cups boiling water.
1 onion 4 Mexican peppers Salt Flour to thicken Wipe the meat with a damp cloth; cut it into small pieces and put it in a frying pan with the drippings, rice, half the boiling .
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What survives here is the skeleton of a fried meat-and-rice stew of the kind that ran through American cookbooks under Spanish and Mexican names in the early twentieth century. Several quantities are missing from the page, so treat the following as guidance for working from the method rather than a set of substitutions.
- The meat is unspecifiedNo cut or weight is given in the surviving text. A braising cut such as beef chuck or round suits the method as written; a pound and a half feeds four with rice.
- Mexican peppersIn American books of this period the term generally means dried chiles, such as ancho or the long red pods sold simply as "chile". Four whole dried pods, stemmed and seeded, is a mild to moderate heat; four fresh serranos would be very different and much hotter.
- DrippingsRendered beef or pork fat saved from roasting. Lard, bacon fat or a neutral oil all work; the point is a fat that tolerates browning heat.
- Brown the meat properlyThe page does not say to sear, but small pieces going into hot fat will take colour, and browning them before liquid goes in improves the dish. Crowd the pan and the meat steams grey.
- Rice in the panThe rice is fried with the meat and drippings before liquid is added, the same principle as a pilaf or Spanish rice. It should turn chalky and smell toasted, not brown.
- "Half the boiling"The phrase breaks off, but the intent is clear enough: half the boiling water or stock goes in first, the rest as the rice absorbs it. Long-grain white rice needs roughly twice its volume of liquid in total.
- Flour to thickenThe page does not say when the flour goes in; it can be added as a slurry at the end or stirred into a little of the fat. With rice already in the pan the dish thickens considerably on its own, so use flour sparingly or the result turns pasty.
- Cooking timeCut small, a braising cut will take somewhere around an hour to an hour and a half at a bare simmer, depending on the meat. Rice cooked that long disintegrates, so add it partway through rather than at the start if you want distinct grains.
Guiso is simply the Spanish word for a stew or braise, from guisar, to cook or season, and it covers an enormous family of dishes across Spain and Latin America rather than one fixed recipe. The version here is pared down to the ingredients a general grocer could supply -- drippings, rice, onion and whatever dried chiles were sold as "Mexican peppers". Loose-leaf books like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as binders so that housekeepers could add and reorder pages, which is why entries were kept terse and why single-dish leaves of this sort circulated so widely.