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Chopped Beef
Chop half a pound of raw beef, from the tender part of the round, very fine. Rub the bottom of the hot blazer with butter, put in the meat with one teaspoonful of grated onion, stir, and cook four or five minutes; add two tablespoonfuls of butter, salt and pepper, and serve at once. This is good with bread, but better with baked potatoes. A pound of beef may be cooked at one time in a chafing-dish of good size, and the grated onion increased to suit the taste. The juice, of which
A four-minute supper dish from the height of the chafing-dish vogue, and one that lives or dies on the quality of the beef and the heat of the pan.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame without the hot-water bath beneath. Any heavy skillet stands in for it; if you are using an actual chafing dish over an alcohol lamp, let the empty pan sit over the flame several minutes first, since these burners give far less heat than a modern burner.
- Chop, don't grind"Chopped very fine" means cut with a knife or two-handled chopper to a coarse, irregular texture, not pushed through a grinder into paste. Hand-chopped meat stays loose and juicy in the pan; commercial ground round packs and steams.
- DonenessFour or five minutes of stirring over a chafing-dish lamp leaves the beef pink to rare in places. Meat that has been cut up exposes its surfaces throughout, so if there is any doubt about the source, cook it through to 160F rather than following the clock in the original.
- Grated onionGrate the onion on the fine side of a box grater until it is pulp and juice, and add the juice with it.
- The butter at the endThe two tablespoons added after cooking are not for frying; they melt into the meat juices and make the whole of the sauce. Take the pan off the heat before adding them so they emulsify rather than separate.
- Seasoning orderSalt goes in at the end, as written. The usual reasoning is that salting early draws liquid from the chopped beef so it stews rather than browns, though over so short a cooking time the difference is slight.
- YieldHalf a pound serves two as a light supper or one hearty portion. The full pound the author allows for a large chafing dish will feed four with baked potatoes.
- The sentence breaks offThe original text ends mid-thought at "The juice, of which" — the page is cut short in the source. What followed may have been a direction about the accumulated juices, but the wording is lost.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the American chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit-lamp table cooker was standard equipment for late suppers, club rooms and bachelor lodgings — cooking done in the dining room, in front of guests, with no kitchen and no fire to build. Chopped raw beef itself had a second life in that period as invalid and convalescent food: physicians and household manuals recommended finely minced or scraped round, lightly cooked or not at all, as the most digestible form of meat, the same thinking that produced beef tea. The insistence here on the tender part of the round, rather than a cheap cut, is a reminder that the appeal was delicacy rather than economy. The book is by Janet McKenzie Hill, longtime editor of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, whose recipes tend to this same clipped, practical register.