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To Stew Brisket of Beef
365. Put the part with the hard fat into a stew-pot with a small quantity of water; let it boil up, and skim it thoroughly; then add carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and a few peppercorns. Stew till extremely tender; then take out the flat bones, and remove all the fat from the soup. Serve that and the meat in a tureen; or the soup alone, and the meat on a dish, garnished with some vegetables. The following sauce is much admired, served with the beef: - Take half a pint of the soup, and mix it with a spoonful of ketchup, a glass of portwine, a teaspoonful of made mustard, a little flour, a bit of butter, and salt; boil all together a few minutes, then pour it round the meat.
A Victorian boiled-beef dinner that yields two courses from one pot: a clear broth and a joint of meat with a sharp wine sauce. The instructions assume a cook who knows brisket, so the useful additions are quantities, temperature and a translation of two ingredient names.
- The cut"The part with the hard fat" most likely means the fattier, thicker (point) half of the brisket. Buy 4-5 lb bone-in if you can find it, otherwise boneless rolled; the "flat bones" the recipe tells you to remove would be the rib/breastbone ends, which slip out once the meat is tender.
- A small quantity of waterEnough to cover the meat by an inch and no more. The whole point of the method is a broth concentrated enough to serve as soup, and a flooded pot gives you weak liquid and washed-out beef.
- Skim before the vegetables go inThis is the hinge. Bring it to a boil, take off every bit of grey scum, and only then add carrots, turnips, onions and celery. Vegetables added early trap the scum and cloud the broth past rescue.
- Heat and timeAfter the initial boil, hold the pot at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. "Extremely tender" means 3 to 4 hours for a 4-5 lb piece: a skewer should meet no resistance. A hard boil at any stage makes brisket stringy rather than soft.
- Root vegetables will overcookWhole carrots and turnips added at the start will collapse over three hours. If you want them for the garnish, put in a rough batch early for flavour and a fresh, neatly cut batch for the last 30 minutes.
- Removing the fatEasiest done by chilling. Cook the day before, refrigerate the broth overnight, and lift the solid cap off. If serving the same day, blot the surface with paper or draw a ladle across it.
- KetchupIn a nineteenth-century British kitchen this means mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment, not tomato sauce. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a splash of Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet.
- Made mustardMustard already mixed with liquid, that is, ordinary prepared English mustard, as against the dry powder. A teaspoon of English mustard is what is meant.
- The sauceHalf a pint in British measure is 10 fl oz of the broth; a glass of port in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. "A little flour, a bit of butter" can be taken as equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about 2 teaspoons of each, stirred in and then boiled together for the few minutes the recipe specifies.
- YieldA 4-5 lb brisket with its broth serves six to eight. Leftover meat is good pressed under a weight overnight and sliced cold.
Brisket is a hard-working muscle from the lower chest and was for centuries a cheap cut sold to households that had the fuel and the patience for long, slow pots. This recipe belongs to the English tradition of boiled beef with root vegetables, the same lineage as boiled beef and carrots, in which a single joint is made to furnish soup, meat course and cold meat for the following day. The sauce is characteristically mid-Victorian: broth sharpened with port, prepared mustard and a bottled savoury ketchup, part of a family of dark, piquant sauces that leaned on the commercial condiments then filling British larders. Mushroom and walnut ketchups predate tomato ketchup in Britain by a long stretch, and when a nineteenth-century English cookbook says "ketchup" without qualification it is generally one of those that is meant.