Savory Beef
2 pounds beef, plate, shank,
¼ teaspoon ground cloves and rump or round thyme or Summer savory
3 large onions, sliced
1 pint brown stock or boiling
3 tablespoons fat water and meat extract
3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon catchup
¼ teaspoon black pepper
Brown the onions slowly in fat. Increase the heat. Cut meat into sizes desired for serving, add it to the onions, and brown. Mix the flour, pepper and other seasonings. Sprinkle this mixture over the meat. Add the stock, vinegar and catchup. Cover closely. Simmer until meat is tender, allowing at least two hours for shank or plate and one and one-half hour for rump or round.
A plain braise whose ingredient list has been mangled by two-column typesetting; once untangled it is a straightforward pot of beef and onions. The hinge is the browning: the onions go slowly and the meat fast, and both must take real colour or the sauce stays pale and thin.
- The scrambled ingredient listThe columns have run together in printing. Read it as: 2 lb beef (plate, shank, rump or round), 3 large sliced onions, 3 tablespoons fat, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon black pepper, ¼ teaspoon ground cloves, thyme or summer savory (no quantity given), 1 pint brown stock (or boiling water with meat extract), 2 tablespoons vinegar, 1 tablespoon catchup.
- Which cut to buyPlate is the belly cut now sold as short rib or navel; shank is the whole-muscle foreshank, sold bone-in as osso buco or boned as shin. Rump and round are lean and will give you slices rather than shreds. Chuck, unmentioned here, behaves like plate and is easier to find.
- Two tablespoons of vinegar is deliberatePlain distilled or cider vinegar. In this quantity it reads as a seasoning to cut the fat rather than as a tenderiser, and it cooks down to a faint background sharpness over two hours.
- Catchup in 1900Catchup in this period -- Not necessarily tomato. Mushroom and walnut catchups were still in use and were thinner, saltier and more savoury than the modern bottle. Ordinary tomato ketchup works but adds sugar; a spoonful of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire is nearer the intent.
- Meat extractBovril or Liebig's-style beef extract, sold in jars and stirred into boiling water for instant stock. A teaspoon of concentrated beef base or a cube in a pint of water is the direct equivalent.
- Summer savoryA peppery annual herb, once a kitchen-garden staple and still sold dried. Thyme is the alternative the recipe already offers; use a scant half teaspoon dried either way, and keep the cloves to the stated quarter teaspoon or they take over.
- FatBeef dripping or lard was assumed. Any neutral oil or a mix of oil and butter browns just as well, though dripping gives the flavour the recipe was built around.
- Timings run short for shankTwo hours will not always render a bone-in shank tender; allow up to three, and judge by a fork sliding out cleanly rather than by the clock. Lean round, conversely, can go dry past an hour and a half.
- Oven instead of stovetopA covered pot at 325F holds a steadier simmer than a burner and needs no watching. Check once at the halfway mark that the liquid is barely bubbling.
- YieldFour generous servings, or six if the meat is cut small and served over noodles, mashed potato or rice to catch the gravy.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its household books for what was presumably the same readership as its magazines: young women setting up house on a fixed budget. That shows in this recipe, which names four cuts in descending order of cheapness and toughness and tells you how long each needs. The technique is a standard braise of the sort common in American cookbooks of the period, but the seasoning tells you the era more precisely than the method does. Ground cloves in a beef gravy, a spoonful of vinegar and a spoonful of bottled catchup make up a sweet-sour-spiced profile inherited from nineteenth-century English cookery, where mushroom and walnut catchups and commercial sauces did the work that stock reduction and wine do in a French braise. Beef extract, offered here as a stock substitute, was by then an established mass-market pantry item, and its presence in the ingredient list is a quiet acknowledgement that not every reader kept a stockpot going.