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Brisket with Onion Sauce
3 pounds beef brisket Soup greens Cloves Peppercorns Salt I egg Crums 1/2 cup green onions 2 tablespoons fat 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/2 cups stock 1 tablespoon minced parsley Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, and tie it into a compact shape with strips of cloth. Place it in a deep kettle with boiling water (or part of the stock, if possible). Add a bunch of soup greens, several cloves and peppercorns. Simmer until the meat is tender, add salt when partly cooked. Take the meat from the liquid, remove the cloth, and place meat in a shallow bakingdish. Beat one egg and spread over the beef, then sprinkle with coarse crums and brown under a flame or in a hot oven. Serve with onion sauce made as follows: Cut up the onions and brown them in the fat. Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour and stock. Add the parsley and serve.
A two-stage brisket: gently simmered until tender, then glazed with beaten egg and crumbs and browned. The whole dish depends on the first stage being genuinely slow.
- Simmer, never boilBrisket toughens and shreds if the water moves faster than a bare tremble. Hold it at 180-190F; a 3 lb piece needs roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours, tested by a skewer sliding out with no resistance.
- Soup greensThe period shorthand for a bundle of carrot, celery, leek, parsley stems and often a piece of parsnip or celeriac. A carrot, two celery ribs, a leek and a handful of parsley stems will do the same work.
- Salt timingAdding salt partway through, as directed, was common practice for simmered joints, though the usual explanation -- that early salting draws out the juices -- is more received tradition than demonstrated fact. Figure about 1 teaspoon per quart of liquid.
- CrumsDry breadcrumbs, coarsely made; the original gives no quantity. About 3/4 cup is enough to coat the top of a 3 lb brisket in a single layer.
- "A hot oven"425-450F, or a broiler element set high. The crumb coating only needs 5 to 8 minutes to set the egg and take colour, and it will scorch if left unwatched.
- Tying with clothStrips of clean cotton were one common way to hold a boiled joint in shape. Butcher's twine does the job now and comes off more easily.
- The sauceBrown the onions in the fat first, then lift them out, cook the flour in that fat to a nut-brown roux, and whisk in the hot stock before returning the onions. Adding stock to a raw flour-and-fat mixture gives a pasty sauce.
- StockUse the cooking liquid from the brisket, strained and skimmed, rather than fresh stock. It is already well flavoured by the greens and spices.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; three pounds of brisket should serve about six, carved across the grain in thin slices.
Boiled brisket with a brown onion sauce sits at the central European end of the American home-cooking repertoire, and the phrase "soup greens" reads like a rendering of the German Suppengrün or of the Yiddish kitchen's bundle of root vegetables sold tied together at the greengrocer. The egg-and-crumb finish is a thrifty trick: a joint that has given its flavour to the pot comes out pale and unappetising, and glazing and browning it restores something of the appearance of a roast. New Delineator Recipes came out of the Delineator, a mass-circulation women's magazine.