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Braised Beef a la Mode
Lard a piece of beef with salt pork, let it marinade for twelve hours with the juice of half a lemon, a little salt and pepper, a sprig of thyme, two bay leaves and half a dozen parsley roots. Then place the meat in a saucepan with a lump of butter, and brown both sides well for ten minutes, then remove and place it on a dish. Add to the gravy a little flour, stirring it well and moisten with a quart of broth, mixing it slowly while the sauce is boiling; then replace the beef in the sauce-pan with two sliced carrots, and a dozen small onions glazed, and cook for an hour, adding a strong garnished bouquet, a wineglassful of claret wine, and a small piece of crushed garlic, also salt and pepper to taste. After skimming off the fat and straining, serve on a hot dish, arranging the carrots and onions in clusters around the dish. Braised Beef, Providence Style Braise the beef as indicated for braised beef, and add a quarter of a cooked cauliflower, half a breakfast cupful of flageolet beans, and a cupful of carrots, cut with a vegetable scoop shortly before serving. Place the vegetables in a pan with the skimmed gravy and cook for five minutes. Serve the beef on a hot dish, the vegetables arranged in heaps around it, and pour the gravy over the beef.
Oscar's method is a classic French boeuf à la mode compressed into a paragraph, and it assumes a cook who already knows how long a braise takes. The one number to distrust is the cooking time.
- Cook it far longer than an hourA larded pot roast of 3-4 lb needs roughly 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer, or in a 325F oven, before the connective tissue turns to gelatin. One hour will give you sliceable but distinctly chewy beef. Add the carrots and onions only for the last 45 minutes or they collapse.
- The cutUnspecified here, as often in this book. Bottom round or rump is the traditional choice for a la mode; chuck is more forgiving and more flavourful. Whichever you use, buy it in one tied piece.
- LardingThreading strips of salt pork through the meat with a larding needle is what keeps a lean round moist over a long braise. Without a needle, cut deep slits with a thin knife and push in chilled batons of salt pork or fatback.
- Marinate coldThe recipe does not say where the meat should sit for its twelve hours; do it in the refrigerator, turning the meat once or twice. Pat the surface dry before browning or it will steam rather than colour.
- Parsley rootsHamburg or turnip-rooted parsley, sold in some European and farmers' markets. Half a dozen small parsnips, or a parsnip plus the stems from a bunch of parsley, stand in for the flavour.
- "A strong garnished bouquet"A bouquet garni tied with string, more heavily loaded than usual: thyme, bay, parsley stems, and often a leek leaf and celery. It goes in whole and comes out before straining.
- WineglassfulAbout 2 fl oz in period usage, though the term is loose. For a quart of broth you can pour a generous half cup of claret (dry red Bordeaux or any dry red) without unbalancing the sauce.
- Glazed onionsSmall peeled onions cooked in butter with a pinch of sugar and a little stock until the liquid reduces to a shining film. Glaze them separately and keep them aside rather than boiling them in the braise for the full time.
- Straining and yieldThe sauce is strained, so the vegetables served around the dish are the glazed ones set aside plus the sliced carrots, not the aromatics. A 3-4 lb piece serves six to eight.
- The Providence variationFlageolets are small pale-green French shell beans, sold dried or tinned; cook dried ones separately until tender before the five-minute finish in the gravy. The carrots "cut with a vegetable scoop" are parisienne balls, and they need to be cooked through before they go into the sauce.
Boeuf \the securest fixtures of nineteenth-century French bourgeois cooking, a larded and marinated pot roast braised with wine and root vegetables, and it crossed to American hotel kitchens intact, which is how Oscar Tschirky came to print it in his 1896 collection. The name means simply "beef in the fashion," and the dish is generally traced back into the eighteenth century in Paris, where boeuf \`a la mode shops are often said to have sold it by the portion. The larding needle it depends on was standard equipment then. The Providence variation is characteristic of the book's habit of appending regional or house names to a base preparation, the way a hotel carte multiplies a single stockpot into a dozen listed dishes; flageolets and a scoop of shaped carrots were the sort of touch that justified the second name.","removed":"Hedged the eighteenth-century Paris dating and the portion-selling shops as traditional/uncertain; deleted the unsupported causal claim that braising beef was then leaner and tougher than supermarket beef."}<br>Wait — the JSON above contains a corrupted opening. Correct output follows.<br>{