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Blankenberg Beef
This is a winter dish; it is most sustaining, and once made, it can be kept hot for hours without spoiling. Make a puree of lentils or peas, and season it with pepper and salt. Mince your beef with an equal quantity of peeled chestnuts, add chopped parsley, a dust of nutmeg or a few cloves. If you have any cheap red wine pour it over the mince till it is well moistened. If you have no red wine, use gravy. If you have no gravy, use milk. Let all heat up in the oven for ten minutes, then sprinkle in some currants or sultanas. Take the dish you wish to serve it in, put the stew in the middle, and place the puree round it. If the mince is moist it can be kept by the fire till required, or the dish can be covered with another one and placed in a carrying-can, taken out to skating or shooting parties.
A thrifty reheating dish built on cooked meat, written for a household that already had beef left from a joint and a fire to keep things warm. The instructions assume that starting point, so read it as an assembly rather than a braise.
- The beef is already cookedTen minutes in the oven will not cook raw mince through. Use cold roast or boiled beef, chopped or coarsely ground, or brown fresh mince fully in a pan first and only then combine it with the other ingredients.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature and no oven term. Nothing suggests browning, so a moderate oven (around 350F) will do for the ten minutes; it is there to marry the wine and warm the chestnuts, not to reduce anything.
- Chestnuts"Peeled" means shelled and skinned, which is the real work of the dish. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the sensible substitute; a 7 oz pack is near enough to 8 oz of minced beef. The original does not say whether the equal quantity is meant by weight or by volume.
- The pureeLentils or split peas cooked soft with water or stock and beaten smooth, stiff enough to hold a ring around the meat. Brown or green lentils hold their flavour better here than red, which collapse into paste.
- Liquid is by eyeNo quantity is given for the wine, gravy or milk. Add just enough to moisten the mince thoroughly without a pool at the bottom, perhaps 4 to 6 tablespoons per pound of meat; the dish is described as "moist", not saucy.
- Currants at the endThey go in after the heating so they plump rather than dissolve. A tablespoon or two is plenty against the nutmeg and cloves, which are there to keep the sweetness from reading as dessert.
- The carrying-canA covered tin for carrying food out hot, packed for a day outdoors; the recipe describes only covering the dish with another and putting it in the can. A wide-mouthed vacuum flask does the same job; if you hold the dish by the fire or on a low burner instead, keep it above 140F and stir now and then.
- YieldA pound of beef with matching chestnuts and about two cups of puree serves four as a substantial supper.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes collected from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and the collection carries the marks of that displacement throughout: dishes described from memory, quantities left to the cook, and a repeated concern with stretching meat and using what is at hand. Blankenberge is a fishing and seaside resort town on the Flemish coast, and this dish is named for it in the same loose way that regional names attach to home cooking rather than to any documented original. What is period-specific is the structure — cooked meat extended with chestnuts, dried pulses standing in for a vegetable, and a chain of substitutions running from wine down to milk depending on what the larder holds. The carrying-can at the end places it socially: food sent out to skaters and shooting parties in the years before vacuum flasks were common, kept hot by insulation and mass alone.