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Stew from Cold Meat
Free the meat from fat, gristle and bones; cut into small pieces; add salt and water sufficient to cover it. Let simmer until almost ready to break in pieces; add raw onions and potatoes and cook until tender, adding also a little soup stock if available. Cook until the potatoes are done; thicken with flour and serve on small slices of toast. 1 pint cold meat 2 ounces butter
A frugal reheat of Sunday's roast, written for cooks who measured leftovers by the cupful. The ingredient list is bare, so most of the judgement is yours.
- "1 pint cold meat"Cooked meat was measured by volume once diced. A pint of small cubes is roughly a pound, or two generous cups packed.
- Where the butter goesThe method never mentions the 2 ounces of butter. The likeliest use is to work it with the flour into a paste for thickening at the end; browning the onions in it would sit oddly with the recipe's instruction to add them raw.
- Don't simmer it to ragsThe instruction to cook "until almost ready to break in pieces" suits tough boiled beef or mutton. Already-tender roast beef, lamb or pork only needs to heat through; a long second simmer squeezes it dry and stringy.
- Vegetable quantitiesNone are given. One medium onion and two medium potatoes, cut in half-inch dice, suit a pint of meat without swamping it.
- LiquidWater "sufficient to cover" makes a thin, plain gravy. Stock, or water plus a spoonful of the roast's pan drippings, is what carries the flavour here.
- ThickeningNever scatter dry flour into the pot. Whisk two tablespoons into a little cold water, or knead it into the butter, then stir in and simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- YieldServes two to three over toast. The toast should be dry and firm enough not to dissolve on contact; cut in triangles and put the stew on at the table.
Cold-meat cookery was a standing category in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic manuals, where a joint was expected to serve three or four meals: roasted hot, sliced cold, then hashed, stewed or minced on toast. Dishes that stretched a small quantity of meat were also encouraged by the national campaign of wheat and meat conservation during and after the First World War. Serving it on toast rather than with a starch on the side follows the older habit of the sop, bread used to absorb a gravy that would otherwise be too thin to be worth having.