Beef a La Mode
4 lbs. round beef. 2 carrots. 1 turnip. 1/2 onion. 2 pieces celery. 1 cup vinegar. 2 tomatoes or 1/4 cup juice. 1/2 pod garlic. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/2 pod red pepper. 2 tablespoons brown flour.
Wipe beef with fat and salt. Pour over vinegar. Cut up vegetables and put on beef. Let stand several hours. Pour off vinegar. Put beef in pot with a little butter or crisco. Fry on both sides quickly until brown. Then add flour, one and one-half pints of water and vegetables. Cook twenty minutes to the pound. Half a cup of claret can be added.
A vinegar-marinated pot roast of the plain sort, written in the shorthand of a 1920 kitchen. Two or three of the directions need translating before you start.
- The hinge: cook it far longer than the rule saysTwenty minutes to the pound gives about eighty minutes for a four-pound round, which will leave the meat tough and grey. Beef round has enough connective tissue that it needs three hours or more at a bare simmer, covered, until a fork turns easily in it. Judge by feel, not by the clock.
- "Wipe beef with fat and salt"This means rub the surface of the meat with fat and salt before the vinegar goes on, not clean it. Some cooks of the period first wiped the joint with a damp cloth; the sense here is a dry rub.
- Brown flourFlour toasted in a dry pan over low heat until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell. It contributes colour and a roasted flavour but thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so two tablespoons will give a thin gravy rather than a sauce.
- "Pod" of garlic and of red pepperAmbiguous in American books of this date: pod can mean a whole head of garlic or a single clove. Given the scale of the dish, one or two cloves is the sensible reading. Half a pod of red pepper means half a dried red chile, seeds and all.
- CriscoA hydrogenated vegetable shortening in wide household use by 1920, which is why it appears here alongside butter. Any neutral fat, or a mix of butter and oil, does the same work.
- Liquid measuresA pint and a half of water is three cups. Claret is dry red Bordeaux, or any dry red; half a cup added with the water rounds out the vinegar.
- The marinadeA full cup of vinegar on four pounds of beef is aggressive. Several hours is enough; overnight will make the outer half-inch grey and mushy. Drain and pat the meat dry before browning or it will steam instead of searing.
- Oven braisingThe recipe assumes a covered pot on the range. A 300F oven holds the pot at a steadier bare simmer and needs no watching.
- YieldFour pounds of round serves six to eight, with the vegetables cooked to softness in the gravy. Slice across the grain.
The name is a straight borrowing of the French boeuf à la mode, a large piece of beef larded, marinated, and braised slowly with root vegetables — a dish naturalized in English and American cooking well before 1800, to the point that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities had "alamode beef" houses selling little else. By the time this version was printed, the larding needle and the calf's foot that gave the classic French dish its jellied sauce had dropped away, leaving a vinegar-marinated pot roast thickened with browned flour. It was written for households cooking cheap cuts economically just after the First World War, which explains the round rather than a rump or a fillet, and the use of the marinade to compensate for a lean, hard-working muscle.