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Ways of Warming Over Beef
have been parboiled eight minutes in boiling salted water. Put in a buttered pudding-dish, cool, cover with bakingpowder biscuit mixture or pie crust. Bake in a hot oven. If covered with pie crust, make several incisions in crust that gases may escape.
This is the tail end of one of the several leftover-beef treatments grouped under "Ways of Warming Over Beef" — a beef pie built from cold cooked meat and parboiled vegetables under a biscuit or pastry lid. The opening lines, with the meat, gravy and vegetable quantities, fall on the previous page, so read this as method rather than a complete formula.
- What is missingThe surviving text begins mid-sentence, with something already "parboiled eight minutes" in salted water; the ingredients themselves, and whatever moistens the meat, fall on the previous page.
- A hot ovenIn modern terms roughly 425-450F. Biscuit dough needs the high heat to rise quickly; pie crust needs it to set before the fat runs. Figure 20-25 minutes for a biscuit crust, 25-35 for pastry, until the top is well browned and the filling bubbles at the vents.
- Cool, and mean itThis is the hinge of the whole method. Warm filling melts the butter or lard in a biscuit or pie dough before the oven can set it, and the underside turns to paste. Let the filled dish come to room temperature, or chill it, before the crust goes on.
- Pudding-dishA deep round or oval earthenware baking dish; two quarts or so is a fair working size. Any 2-quart casserole or a deep 9-inch pie plate works, so long as the filling comes near the rim -- a shallow layer under a thick crust steams rather than bakes.
- Parboiled eight minutesEight minutes suits root vegetables cut small, say half-inch dice. Larger pieces will still be hard after baking, since the crust seals the dish and the interior never gets much above simmering.
- The incisionsFarmer's "gases" are simply steam. Pastry is a continuous sheet and will dome and split unpredictably without vents; biscuit dough, dropped or cut in rounds, has gaps of its own and needs none.
- The meat is already cookedNothing here is trying to tenderize beef. The bake is only long enough to heat the filling through and cook the crust, so cut the meat in pieces that will warm quickly and season the gravy generously — reheated beef is bland on its own.
- YieldA dish of this size would serve about four to six as a main course.
"Warming over" was a standing category in American cookbooks of the 1890s, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives it several pages under beef alone — hashes, croquettes, scalloped dishes and this pie. Large roasts and boiled joints were the norm in households that cooked for six or eight, and the cold remainder was a planned resource rather than an accident; the cooking-school movement treated its intelligent use as a matter of both economy and character. The biscuit-dough lid is the distinctly American touch, chemical leavening having made a quick baking-powder topping an easy option by the time this book appeared in 1896.