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Flemish Carbonade
Put two onions to color in butter or in hot fat. Then add to them the beef, which you have cut into pieces the size of a small cake. Let it cook for a few minutes, then add pepper, salt, a carrot sliced, and enough water to allow the meat to cook gently by the side of the fire, allowing one and one-half hours for one and one-half pounds of meat. Ten minutes before serving add to the sauce a little meat-juice or Liebig. You may at the same time, if it is wished, cook potatoes with the meat for about twenty minutes. Serve it all in a large dish, the meat in the center and the potatoes round. The sauce is served separately, and without being passed through the sieve. A Use for Cold Mutton Cut the mutton into neat pieces, take away all fat and skin. Fry in butter and add all sorts of vegetables in dice, with thyme, bay-leaves, and parsley. Let all this stew very gently for two hours; you must add more stock or water to prevent in getting dry. Keep the lid of the pan on and, half-an-hour before serving, put in peeled potatoes. This dish is served very liquid.
A plain braise written for a coal range, with a second short recipe for leftover mutton tacked on at the end. Both are straightforward once a few of the period's assumptions are translated.
- No beer, and that is deliberateMost modern carbonade flamande is built on brown ale, often with mustard-smeared bread to thicken it. This version uses water alone and leans on the onions and the meat extract for depth. Adding a bottle of ale in its place is a reasonable liberty, but it is not what is written here.
- "The size of a small cake"An unhelpful measure even in 1915. Read it as chunks of roughly two inches — large enough to stay juicy over ninety minutes, small enough to sit neatly on a plate.
- Cut of beefThe recipe does not specify, because the household cook would have used whatever was cheap. Chuck, shin or blade is right; anything lean and quick-cooking will be dry and stringy at the end of the stated time.
- "By the side of the fire""By the side the fire" -- On a range, the cooler part of the hob. On a modern stove this means the barest simmer with the lid on — a bubble every second or two. A very low oven will do much the same job with less attention, though the recipe itself never calls for one.
- LiebigLiebig's Extract of Meat, the dark beef paste sold in stoneware jars from the 1860s onward. Bovril, Marmite's beefy cousins, a good concentrated beef stock or a spoon of demi-glace all stand in. It is a seasoning at the end, not a cooking liquid.
- Potatoes in the potTwenty minutes assumes small or halved potatoes already sitting in simmering liquid. Test with a knife rather than the clock; if they are large, they will need longer and will start to break down into the sauce, which is not a disaster.
- The unsieved sauceThe instruction not to strain matters. The onions and carrot are meant to have collapsed into the liquid and are the only body the sauce gets — there is no flour and no roux anywhere in this recipe.
- YieldA pound and a half of beef with potatoes serves three or four.
- The mutton recipeThis is a reheat of already-cooked meat, so the two-hour stew is about softening vegetables and building liquid, not cooking the mutton, which will shred if pushed that far. Cut it larger than you think and add it later if you want recognisable pieces. Lamb shoulder works; mutton proper is a special order in most places now.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it reads like what it is: home cooking recalled from memory by people with no kitchen of their own. That context explains a good deal here he ale, the reliance on a jar of Liebig's extract for savour, and a companion recipe whose entire purpose is to use up cold mutton. The name carbonade traces back through French to the Latin carbo, charcoal, and originally meant meat grilled over coals; in Flanders it long ago shifted to mean the slow beef-and-onion stew, and the charcoal survives only in the word. Cooks who know the dish from Belgian brasseries today will notice the missing beer, near-universal in modern versions, and the missing gingerbread, which is one common thickening among several rather than a settled requirement. Whether they were omitted from thrift, from wartime scarcity, or simply because one family did it this way, the book does not say.