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Stewed Beef (If you are obliged to make)
If you are obliged to make a hot dish in a hurry and have only a piece of inferior meat, there is no better way of using it than by dressing it in the Brabant way, which is rather expensive. Clean and cook some mushrooms, and when fried lightly, add them and their liquor to your beef, cut up in small pieces, but not minced. Add pepper, salt, a dust of spices, or an onion with three or four cloves in it, and a half bottle of good red wine. Stew all together for at least twenty minutes, take out the onion and cloves, and serve in the dish it was cooked in which should be an earthenware pot. A Mutton Salad Cut some slices of cold mutton or lamb, removing every bit of fat and skin that you can, unless that destroys the firmness of the slice. Prepare a salad of lettuce, and if you cannot give a mayonnaise sauce, add to the lettuce plenty of sliced cucumber, for that keeps the mutton moist. Put the salad on each slice and roll the meat over as tightly as you can. Lay the rolls closely together in a dish and sprinkle a very little salad dressing over them. This way of doing meat is very useful for taking to picnics, or for taking on a long journey.
Two wartime economy dishes run together on one page: a fast red-wine beef stew from Brabant, and a way of dressing up cold roast mutton. Both assume a cook working with leftovers and no fuss.
- The twenty minutes is the problemTwenty minutes will not tenderise "inferior meat" — collagen needs an hour and a half to three hours of gentle simmering to break down. Either accept the original as written and use a quick-cooking cut (sirloin tip, skirt, or thin-sliced chuck cut very small), or commit to a proper braise at a bare simmer and top up with stock as the wine reduces.
- Half a bottle of wineA standard bottle in this period held about 26 fl oz (roughly 750 ml), so half is about 1 1/2 cups. It is a generous amount of liquid for a short cook; if you stew only twenty minutes, reduce the sauce hard at the end or it will taste raw and thin.
- "A dust of spices"This means no more than a small pinch of mixed spice. A blend along the lines of quatre epices -- pepper, nutmeg, clove and ginger or cinnamon -- would suit; a scant quarter teaspoon of a mixed blend is the intent, not a heaping spoonful.
- The onion-and-clovesAn onion studded with three or four whole cloves is a classic flavouring device: it perfumes the pot and lifts out cleanly. Peel it but leave it whole so the cloves stay anchored, and count them going in so you can account for them coming out.
- The earthenware potServing in the cooking vessel is the point of the dish, but most modern earthenware is not flameproof. Use a glazed flameproof clay pot, an enamelled cast-iron casserole, or brown it in a pan and finish in an ovenproof dish at 325F.
- Mushrooms"Clean and cook some mushrooms" means frying them lightly in fat before they go in, and keeping every drop of the liquor they throw off, as the recipe directs -- that liquid is doing much of the seasoning work here. Half a pound for a pound of beef is a reasonable ratio.
- YieldNeither recipe gives quantities. A pound of beef, half a pound of mushrooms and 1 1/2 cups of wine serves three; the mutton rolls make one roll per slice, and four or five to a person is a picnic portion.
- The mutton saladSlice the cold meat thin enough to roll without cracking, and dress the lettuce and cucumber only lightly — a wet filling will soak the meat and collapse on a journey. Keep the rolls cold, and eat them the same day.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and the book carries the mark of that displacement throughout: thrift, cold meat put to second use, and dishes recalled from home rather than measured out in a kitchen. Brabant, the province around Brussels and Leuven, gives its name to the beef here, and the method — cheap meat, mushrooms, wine, a clove-studded onion, all served in the clay pot it cooked in — belongs to the same family as the better-known carbonade, though that is made with beer rather than red wine. The author's note that the dish is "rather expensive" is telling: in wartime Britain a half-bottle of good red wine was the extravagance, not the beef. The mutton salad rolls, meanwhile, are the practical half of the page, aimed at picnics and "a long journey" — a phrase that in 1915 would have meant something rather different to the women who supplied these recipes.