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Scalloped Corned Beef
2 cups cooked corned beef cut 1 stalk celery into cubes
2 slices onion
1 cup medium white sauce
Bread-crums
Butter
Cook chopped celery and onions in the sauce. Put the cornedbeef in a shallow baking-dish and add the sauce. Sprinkle with bread-crums moistened with melted butter. Brown in a hot oven.
The ingredient list was set in two columns and has run together in transcription; read it as 2 cups cooked corned beef in cubes, 1 stalk celery, 2 slices onion, 1 cup medium white sauce, bread crumbs and butter. It is a leftovers dish, and the only real work is the sauce.
- Medium white sauceIn this period that means 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Thin sauce used 1 tablespoon of each, thick sauce 3 or 4; "medium" is the standard binding consistency for scalloped dishes.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. The filling is already cooked, so the oven is only there to heat it through and colour the crumbs, which should take somewhere around 15 to 20 minutes.
- Cook the vegetables properlyThe recipe gives no time for the celery and onion in the sauce, and a brief simmer will not soften them. Give them 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer, or sweat them in the butter before adding the flour, or the dish comes out with raw crunch in it.
- SaltNo salt is called for, and none should be added until you have tasted. Corned beef carries a great deal of it, and it will move into the sauce as the dish bakes.
- Bread crumbsFresh soft crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry commercial crumbs, tossed with 1 to 2 tablespoons melted butter until the crumbs are coated rather than soaked.
- The beefHome-boiled brisket, trimmed and cut in half-inch cubes; deli-sliced corned beef works but goes stringy. Canned corned beef is softer and will break down into the sauce rather than staying in pieces.
- YieldServes three to four from a one-quart shallow dish, as a supper dish with potatoes or a green vegetable.
Scalloped anything is the backbone of American household cookery around 1900: cooked meat or fish, a white sauce, a buttered crumb top, and a hot oven to pull it together. The point was economy, and the specific economy here is the tail end of a boiled corned beef dinner. Butterick, a pattern company that published The Delineator and a shelf of domestic manuals, was selling household competence to the same readers who bought its dress patterns, and recipes like this one assume a cook who already knows how to make white sauce and simply needs to be told what to do with the remains of an earlier dinner. "Scalloped" is usually traced to the older sense of a dish baked in a shell or shallow pan, long before the word attached itself specifically to potatoes.