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Hashed Beef
Cold roast beef, preferably sirloin, should be used for this dish and should be sliced to half an inch in thickness. Place in a stewpan, cover with stock, adding one or two minced onions and a turnip to every pound of meat required. Let it heat slowly and simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Thicken with flour stirred in smoothly, adding some salt and pepper, and when done place on a dish and serve with some red currant jelly. A wineglassful of claret and a little sugar may be added to the gravy, if desired; garnish with sippets of toasted bread.
A leftover dish from the Waldorf's kitchen, closer to a quick braise than to what most cooks now call hash. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who knows how to thicken a gravy without lumps.
- It is sliced, not choppedNineteenth-century "hashed" beef often meant meat cut in slabs and reheated in gravy. Keep the half-inch thickness; thinner slices shred into strings during the simmer.
- StewpanAny wide, heavy saucepan or small braiser with a lid. Width matters more than depth, so the slices lie flat in a single layer and stay covered by liquid.
- A wineglassfulRoughly 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Waldorf-era wineglasses ran small; anything up to 1/3 cup is within the spirit of the original.
- The turnipOne small white turnip per pound of beef, peeled and quartered. It is there for sweetness and body in the stock rather than as a vegetable to serve, and can be lifted out before the flour goes in.
- Simmer, never boilThe beef is already cooked; the three-quarters of an hour is to soften it and build flavour in the stock. Held at a bare tremble it comes out tender; a rolling boil will tighten the slices and make them stringy.
- ThickeningDo not shake dry flour into hot stock. Work about a tablespoon of flour into an equal weight of soft butter and whisk that paste into the simmering liquid in pieces, or slake the flour with a little cold stock first. Give it three or four minutes to lose the raw taste.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, crusts off, arranged around the edge of the platter. Fried in butter they hold up better under the gravy.
- YieldA pound of cold roast beef with its gravy serves two generously, three with potatoes. Scale onions, turnip and stock by the pound as written.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is a working record of a large hotel kitchen, which is why it deals so plainly with yesterday's roast. Cold sirloin was a constant by-product of hotel and household service alike, and cookbooks of the period devote whole sections to reheating it without disgrace: hashed, minced, devilled, in rissoles, or under a crust. The red currant jelly and the glass of claret are the English touch, the same pairing then standard with roast mutton and venison, and the sippets of toast are an older English term still current in Victorian kitchens for the bread that sopped up gravy at the rim of the dish. Together they mark this as a hotel version of an English family supper rather than anything French, in a book otherwise thick with sauces and garnishes borrowed from Paris.