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Ragout of Cold Meat
Take any cold meat that you have, free it from fat and skin and cut it in rounds like a five-franc piece. If you have some lean bacon or ham, a little of that should be added. I should tell you first of all to put some rice on to boil in boiling water. Make a sauce of flour and butter in a pan, adding gravy if you happen to have it, but failing that, use water and vinegar in equal parts to thin it; season with pepper and salt and a small spoonful of anchovy sauce. When the sauce is heating, put in the meat and cover the pan, let it all heat for twelve minutes and then place meat and sauce in the middle of a dish. By this time the rice may be tender. Drain it well and put it as a border to the stew.
A Quickly Made Stew Put a piece of butter in a stewpan, with an onion cut in pieces, a few cloves, salt and pepper, a tablespoonful of shredded parsley, and if you have it some good gravy or meat juice and water. Throw into the sauce some cold meat, preferably underdone, and after it has simmered for fifteen minutes take a cut onion and rub with it the bottom of the dish that you are going to use. Take a good glass of red wine, such as Burgundy and mix it with the yolk of an egg, stir this into the stew and serve up in a couple of minutes.
Two thrift dishes for yesterday's roast, written for a cook who is expected to judge quantities by eye. Both hinge on gentle reheating: the meat is already cooked, and anything approaching a boil will make it stringy.
- A five-franc pieceAbout an inch and a half across. Cut the meat in thin coins of that diameter, not chunks; thin slices warm through without toughening.
- No quantities givenWork from what you have. As a guide, 1 lb of cold meat wants about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour, with roughly a pint of liquid, and will feed three or four with the rice.
- Water and vinegar in equal partsEqual parts is fiercely sharp by current taste. Use stock if you have any; if you are following the original, start with a tablespoon or two of vinegar in the liquid and taste before adding more.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled sauce of anchovy, vinegar and spice, still sold in Britain and close to Worcestershire sauce in function. A teaspoon of either, or two mashed anchovy fillets, gives the same salty depth.
- Twelve minutes, coveredKeep the pan at a bare shiver, not a simmer. The meat is only being heated through; twelve minutes at a proper boil will dry it out.
- The rice borderPlain long-grain rice, boiled in plenty of salted water and drained hard, then packed round the edge of a warmed dish. Allow about 1 1/2 oz dry rice per person and start it before anything else, as the recipe says.
- The egg yolk in the second stewThis is a liaison and it will curdle if it boils. Pull the pan off the heat, beat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolk and wine first, then return it and warm through without letting it bubble.
- Rubbing the dish with onionAn old trick for perfuming a serving dish. Cut an onion in half and wipe the cut face round the inside of the warmed platter; it flavours the surface without adding texture.
The Belgian Cook Book was gathered in 1915 from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it was sold to raise money for their relief. That origin shows in pages like this one: the dish is not a formal recipe so much as a method for making a second dinner out of a first, with no weights, no fixed meat, and a sauce thinned with water and vinegar when there is no gravy in the house. Reheating cold roast in a sharp, well-seasoned sauce is common to French and Flemish domestic cooking, where such dishes are generally grouped under ragoût or émincé; the finishing of the second stew with red wine and an egg yolk is the same liaison used in richer bourgeois cookery, applied here to leftovers.