Home › Meat › Brisket with Onion Sauce
Brisket with Onion Sauce
3 pounds beef brisket
Crums
Soup greens
½ cup green onions
Cloves
2 tablespoons fat
Peppercorns
2 tablespoons flour
Salt
1½ cups stock
1 egg
1 tablespoon minced parsley
Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, and tie it into a compact shape with strips of cloth. Place it in a deep kettle with boiling water (or part of the stock, if possible). Add a bunch of soup greens, several cloves and peppercorns. Simmer until the meat is tender, add salt when partly cooked. Take the meat from the liquid, remove the cloth, and place meat in a shallow bakingdish. Beat one egg and spread over the beef, then sprinkle with coarse crums and brown under a flame or in a hot oven. Serve with onion sauce made as follows: Cut up the onions and brown them in the fat. Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour and stock. Add the parsley and serve.
A two-stage brisket: gently poached in aromatic broth, then crumbed and browned. The list of ingredients is printed in two columns and reads as gibberish in a single line, so sort it out before you begin.
- Reading the ingredient listThe run-together text is two columns: 3 lb brisket, soup greens, ½ cup green onions, 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups stock, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon minced parsley, plus crumbs, cloves, peppercorns and salt. The crumbs, cloves, peppercorns and salt are given without quantities.
- Crums and soup greens"Crums" is simply breadcrumbs, and "coarse" here means dry crumbs from stale bread rather than fine commercial crumb. "Soup greens" is not specified, but the term generally covers a tied bundle of root vegetables and herbs -- carrot, leek, celery, parsley stems; a standard bouquet garni does the job.
- Timing the simmerThree pounds of brisket needs roughly 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer, never a boil, which toughens the muscle fibres before the collagen has a chance to melt. Test with a skewer: it should meet no resistance.
- When the salt goes inThe recipe adds salt only when the meat is partly cooked, a common instruction in older boiled-beef directions. The recipe does not say why, and does not specify that the cooking liquid becomes the sauce stock.
- Tying the meatThe recipe calls for strips of cloth. Butcher's twine is easier to remove and will not shed lint into the broth.
- The ovenA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Under a broiler the crumbs take three or four minutes; in the oven allow ten to twelve, watching closely, since the egg wash browns fast once it sets.
- Green onionsThese are scallions, and half a cup means the sliced whites and pale greens rather than a measured half cup of whole stalks. Cook them slowly in the fat until they take colour without scorching, since burnt allium turns the sauce bitter.
- The brown sauceTwo tablespoons each of fat and flour to 1½ cups stock gives a thin pouring gravy, correct for this dish. Cook the roux until it smells nutty and looks like wet sand before the stock goes in, and use the strained brisket liquid rather than fresh stock.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; three pounds of brisket, once trimmed and cooked down, will serve about six. The meat slices better after resting ten minutes off the heat.
The method here — boil the joint, then coat it in egg and crumbs and colour it in the oven — is a thrifty way of making boiled beef presentable at table, and the soup-green bundle and onion sauce would not be out of place in central European cooking. Butterick issued cookery collections for a general American readership in the early twentieth century. Brisket was a cheap cut precisely because it demands long moist cooking, and the broth here returns as the basis of the sauce.