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Pepper (Wipe meat remove from bone cut)
Wipe meat, remove from bone, cut in one and one-half inch cubes, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Cut some of the fat in small pieces and try out in frying-pan. Add meat and stir constantly, that the surface may be quickly seared; when well browned, put in kettle, and rinse frying-pan with boiling water, that none of the goodness may be lost. Add to meat remaining fat, and bone sawed in pieces; cover with boiling water and boil five minutes, then cook at a lower temperature until meat is tender (time required being about three hours). Add carrot, turnip, and onion, with salt and pepper the last hour of cooking. Parboil potatoes five minutes, and add to stew fifteen minutes before taking from fire. Remove bones, large pieces of fat, and then skim. Thicken with onefourth cup flour, diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Pour in deep hot platter, and surround with dumplings. Remnants of roast beef are usually made into a beef stew; the meat having been once cooked, there is no neces sity of browning it. If gravy is left, it should be added to the stew. 2 cups flour
This is Fannie Farmer's brown beef stew, printed without its ingredient list intact — the trailing "2 cups flour" is the beginning of the dumpling recipe that follows. Assume roughly 3 lb of bone-in stewing beef, 1 turnip, 2 carrots, 1 onion, and 6 potatoes.
- The hinge: sear dry, then never boil hardThe meat must be wiped dry, floured, and put into hot rendered fat in batches so it browns rather than steams; crowding the pan is the usual failure. After the initial five-minute boil, the pot should hold at a bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil for three hours shreds the meat into strings and leaves the broth cloudy.
- "Try out" the fatThis means rendering: chop the trimmed beef fat small and melt it slowly in the pan until the solids are crisp, then discard them and brown in the clear fat. Two tablespoons of a neutral oil or beef tallow does the same job if your meat came trimmed.
- The bone mattersThe instruction assumes a butcher has sawn the bone into pieces for you; the recipe does not say which bone. Ask for cut marrow or shank bones, or buy bone-in shank and cube the meat off it yourself. The bone's gelatin gives the broth a fuller, faintly sticky body you will miss without it.
- Deglazing, in period language"Rinse frying-pan with boiling water, that none of the goodness may be lost" is deglazing. Pour half a cup of boiling water into the hot pan, scrape the browned film loose, and tip all of it into the kettle.
- Vegetable timingAn hour of simmering will reduce modern carrots and turnips to mush; 25 to 30 minutes is closer to right for inch pieces. Judge by the vegetables, not the clock, and add them near the end of the meat's cooking time.
- PotatoesThe five-minute parboil is usually explained as drawing off surface starch so the stew does not turn gluey, though the recipe itself gives no reason. Waxy potatoes hold their shape best; fifteen minutes in the stew suits inch cubes, longer for halves.
- ThickeningThe quarter cup of flour slurried with cold water must be stirred in while the liquid simmers and then cooked two or three minutes, or it will taste raw and pasty. Skim the fat first, as directed, or the flour will bind it into the sauce.
- DumplingsThe dumplings called for are the book's baking-powder dumplings, whose first line ("2 cups flour") is the fragment trailing this recipe; they are dropped on the stew and steamed under a tight lid for something in the region of ten to twelve minutes. Do not lift the lid partway through, and do not let the stew boil up around them.
- YieldIf you start from about 3 lb of bone-in beef, expect roughly six generous servings. The closing note on using up cold roast beef is a separate, faster dish: no browning, and only long enough to heat through.
Brown stew of this kind was a common American economy dinner in the late nineteenth century, and it sits in the beef chapter of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book among dishes built on cheap, bone-heavy cuts. The method here is careful and explicit: sear for flavour, a brief hard boil followed by long gentle cooking, vegetables staggered so each is done at the same moment, and the frying pan rinsed out so nothing is wasted. The closing sentence about remnants of roast beef is the book's habitual thrift talking; the same volume gives instructions for using leftover gravy, cold potatoes and stale bread wherever it can. Dumplings around the edge of a deep hot platter were a common presentation.