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Roast Beef with Gravy
Cut cold roast beef in thin slices, place on a warm platter, and pour over some of the gravy reheated to the boilingpoint. If meat is allowed to stand in gravy on the range, it becomes hard and tough.
Roast Beef, Mexican Sauce Reheat cold roast beef cut in thin slices, in Mexican Sauce. Cook one onion, finely chopped, in two tablespoons butter five minutes. Add one red pepper, one green pepper, and one clove of garlic, each finely chopped, and two tomatoes peeled and cut in pieces. Cook fifteen minutes, add one teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, one-fourth teaspoon celery salt, and salt to taste.
Two ways to serve yesterday's roast: bare slices under boiling gravy, or the same slices warmed through in a quick pepper-and-tomato sauce. Both live or die on the same point — the beef is already cooked and only wants heat.
- The hingeGet the gravy or sauce to a full boil first, then add the meat off the heat, or pour the liquid over slices on the platter. Farmer's warning is the whole technique: beef left standing in gravy on the range turns hard and tough.
- Slice cold, serve hotCold roast slices far thinner and more cleanly than warm. Cut against the grain as thin as your knife will manage; thin slices come to temperature in the time it takes to carry the platter to the table.
- The peppers"One red pepper, one green pepper" in an American cookbook of this period may mean fresh sweet peppers, though 'red pepper' was also commonly used for cayenne. Read as chiles the sauce becomes considerably hotter.
- TomatoesTwo peeled tomatoes means two ripe summer tomatoes, roughly 3/4 lb. Out of season, about a cup of drained canned tomatoes gives a closer result than pale fresh ones, since the sauce is cooked down rather than served raw.
- Fifteen minutes means fifteen minutesThe vegetables should collapse into a rough, jammy sauce with no raw pepper crunch left. If it looks watery at the end, keep it over the heat a little longer before seasoning — a thin sauce will cool the beef instead of heating it.
- Worcestershire and celery saltBoth are still sold and essentially unchanged. Add the Worcestershire at the end as written; boiling it hard dulls its sharpness. Salt last, after the Worcestershire and celery salt have gone in, or the sauce is easily overdone.
- YieldThe sauce is enough for about 1 lb of sliced beef, serving three or four. For the plain version, allow roughly 1/4 cup of reheated gravy per person.
This is leftovers cookery, and it says a good deal about how a turn-of-the-century household ran: a large Sunday roast was expected to reappear for two or three more meals. The plain gravy version is the older, English-derived habit; the "Mexican Sauce" reflects a fashion in American cookbooks of the 1890s and after for peppers, garlic and Worcestershire under Spanish and Mexican names, which usually signalled little more than tomato and capsicum. Note the garlic — a single clove, finely chopped, and unremarked upon — appearing here in a dish marked as foreign.