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Shin of Beef
363. Take off the skin and cut long pieces off; stew them gently in a little water till tender, then add tomata sauce (or, if fresh tomatas, boil and rub through a sieve), and boil. Season with pepper and salt. Or-Dip it in vinegar; stew gently till tender, with one or two onions, and serve.
A frugal stew of shin meat, given in two versions: one finished with tomato, the other with onion and a splash of vinegar. Everything depends on long, slow cooking.
- The cutShin is the foreleg, heavily laced with collagen and usually sold on the bone. Ask for it boneless if you want the "long pieces" the recipe describes, or buy it bone-in and strip the meat yourself, keeping the bone for the pot.
- The hinge: time, not heat"Stew gently till tender" means a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, for 3 to 4 hours. Shin cooked fast stays stringy; only sustained low heat converts the connective tissue to gelatin and gives the sauce its body.
- "A little water"The original specifies no quantity, and the emphasis is on keeping it sparing: just enough to stop the meat catching. The meat releases a good deal of liquid, and a small amount of water keeps the finished gravy concentrated rather than washed out.
- "Tomata sauce"In a book of this period this is a cooked, sieved, seasoned tomato sauce of the kind kept bottled in the larder, not modern sweetened ketchup. Passata or a plain tin of tomatoes reduced and sieved is the closest match; allow about a cup.
- Fresh tomatoesThe instruction to boil and sieve removes skins and seeds. About 2 lb of ripe tomatoes cooked down and passed through a sieve yields roughly a cup of sauce.
- Season at the endPepper and salt go in after the meat is tender and the sauce has reduced, as the recipe specifies. Salting a reducing liquid early makes the seasoning hard to judge.
- The vinegar variantThe dip reads as a brief one rather than a marinade. Malt or cider vinegar suits it, and the one or two onions can be sliced or quartered so they collapse into the gravy.
- YieldTwo pounds of shin, off the bone, serves four with potatoes or bread. Both versions improve reheated the next day, once the gelatin has set and the flavour settled.
Shin was among the cheapest beef on the block, sold to households that had fuel and patience but little money, and it suits long unattended stewing on the back of a range. The older spelling "tomata" was common in British cookery books of the earlier nineteenth century, when the tomato was still a comparatively recent arrival in British cooking and was more often met as a bottled sauce than as a fresh fruit; the parenthetical instruction for cooks who do have fresh tomatoes to hand reads as an accommodation rather than the default. Two alternatives are offered here, one tomato and one onion-and-vinegar, so a household could vary the week's dinners without varying the butcher's bill.