Beef à la Mode
Insert twelve large lardoons in a four-pound piece of beef cut from the round. Make incisions for lardoons by running through the meat a large skewer. Season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and brown the entire surface in pork fat. Put on a trivet in kettle, surround with one-third cup each carrot, turnip, celery, and onion cut in dice, sprig of parsley, bit of bay leaf, and water to half cover meat. Cover closely, and cook slowly four hours, keeping liquor below the boilingpoint. Remove to hot platter. Strain liquor, thicken and season to serve as a gravy. When beef is similarly prepared (with exception of lardoons and vegetables), and cooked in smaller amount of water, it is called Smothered Beef, or Pot Roast. A bean-pot (covered with a piece of buttered paper, tied firmly down) is the best utensil to use for a Pot Roast.
A straightforward braise, but two details carry the whole dish: the meat must never actually boil, and the lardoons are structural rather than decorative.
- Keep it below the boil"Cook slowly four hours, keeping liquor below the boilingpoint" is the instruction that decides whether this is tender or stringy. A bare shiver at the surface, roughly 180-190F, is what you want; a rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibers and tightens the round into shoe leather. The recipe assumes a covered kettle on the stove, but a low oven (around 275-300F) may hold that range more steadily than a burner.
- LardoonsStrips of salt pork or fatback about a quarter inch square and as long as the meat is thick, threaded into holes made with a skewer. Round is lean and dry, and the fat melting inside is what keeps it moist over four hours. Salt pork or thick-cut unsmoked bacon works; a larding needle is easier than a skewer if you have one.
- The cutA four-pound piece from the round -- bottom round or a rump roast is the modern equivalent. Chuck will be juicier but will not slice as neatly.
- Pork fat for browningRendered lard, or the trimmings from your salt pork. Any fat with a high smoke point does the job; the browning matters more than the medium.
- Trivet in the kettleAnything that lifts the meat off the metal so the bottom does not scorch or stew: a metal rack, a few rings of thick-cut onion, or an inverted heatproof saucer. The water half covers the meat, so this is a braise, not a stew.
- One-third cup eachAbout 1 1/2 to 2 oz of each vegetable, diced -- a modest quantity, meant to flavor the liquor rather than be served. They will be spent by the end; strain them out as directed and make the gravy from the liquid.
- Thickening the gravyNo proportion is given. A roux of 1 to 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of strained liquor gives a normal gravy consistency; taste for salt at the end, since the liquor concentrates somewhat even in a closely covered pot.
- The bean-pot noteFor the pot-roast variation, the buttered paper tied over a bean-pot is a seal against evaporation, since bean-pots have loose lids. A modern Dutch oven with a heavy fitting lid does the same thing, and a sheet of parchment pressed down under the lid still helps if the pot is wide.
- YieldFour pounds of round serves six to eight, sliced across the grain. Let it rest before slicing or the juices run out onto the platter.
"Beef à la mode" is the English rendering of the French boeuf à la mode, a larded, aromatically braised piece of beef that eighteenth-century English cookbooks had already naturalized -- Hannah Glasse gives a version, and by Fannie Farmer's day the name was often applied in America to a larded pot roast with vegetables. What is characteristic of this book is the closing sentence, which quietly files the grander French dish and the plain New England pot roast as the same technique with the trimmings removed: same browning, same closed pot, less water, no lardoons. The Boston Cooking School often taught method rather than dish, so that a student who understood one long slow braise below the boiling point understood a dozen. The bean-pot recommendation is a local touch, since a glazed earthenware bean-pot was a familiar Boston vessel for Saturday-night beans and held gentle heat better than thin metal.