Braised Beef
6 Pounds Round or Rump Beef (no bone) 1 Teaspoon Salt 1/2 Teaspoon Pepper Onions, carrots, turnips, sweet herbs.
Wipe and trim beef. Sear brown on all sides in very hot frying pan. In braising pan or iron kettle put the vegetables in layers, with the seasoning. Lay on the meat; add pint of boiling water.
Cover closely and cook four hours in moderate oven. Add water if it evaporates. Put meat on hot platter, strain, thicken and season gravy. Vegetables may be served separately if desired.
A plain pot roast in the older sense: seared, set on a bed of aromatics, and cooked slow with very little liquid. The proportions are sound; only the oven language and a few habits need translating.
- "Moderate oven"Read this as 325-350F. At six pounds and four hours, 325F is the safer choice for even cooking; the meat should be fork-tender rather than merely done.
- The hinge: a hard sear"Very hot frying pan" is not a formality. Much of the colour and depth in the finished gravy comes from the crust you build here, since a pint of water and four covered hours add relatively little on their own. Dry the meat thoroughly, use a heavy pan, and take it well past pale brown on every face.
- Not a stewA pint of water under six pounds of beef is deliberate. The vegetables release more as they cook and the closed lid returns the steam. Keep the liquid shallow; topping it up generously turns a braise into boiled beef.
- The vegetable bedThe onions, carrots and turnips are unmeasured because they are structural as much as edible: they lift the meat off the pan floor and flavour the liquid. Two onions, three or four carrots and one medium turnip is a reasonable reading. If you mean to serve them, add a second batch cut larger in the last hour, as the first will collapse.
- "Sweet herbs"In period usage this generally meant some mix of thyme, parsley, marjoram, savory and bay, tied so it can be pulled out before straining. A teaspoon of dried thyme and two bay leaves will do.
- Cut and modern beefRound is lean and can finish dry and stringy; rump, or a boneless chuck roast, gives a better result at this length of cooking. Tie the roast so it holds shape over four hours.
- Thickening the gravyStrain, then skim the fat and reserve some of it: roughly three tablespoons fat cooked with three tablespoons flour, whisked into the strained liquid, will lightly thicken about a quart. Expect rather less liquid than that from a pint of water, and scale the roux to what you actually have. Taste for salt only at this stage, since the liquid has been reducing.
- Resting and yieldLet the meat sit on the hot platter ten to fifteen minutes before carving, and cut across the grain. Six pounds of boneless beef serves ten to twelve, with leftovers that slice well cold.
Braising sits between roasting and boiling, and cookbooks of this period were fond of it for exactly that reason: it made the cheaper, harder-working cuts of the animal, round and rump, palatable to a household that could not afford to roast rib every Sunday. The technique itself is French in name, from braise, live coals, recalling the old braising pan with a recessed lid that held embers so heat came from above as well as below; by the time this book was printed the covered iron kettle in a moderate oven had taken over the same job. The vegetable bed and the bundle of "sweet herbs" are the standing furniture of nineteenth-century English and American cookery, assumed to be in every kitchen and therefore never measured.