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Shrimp Toast
Fry some slices of crumb of bread in butter, then cut them into rounds with a plain two-inch cutter. When cold, mask the fried rounds with shrimp butter, arrange a star of trimmed shrimp's tails on the top of each and sprinkle a little chopped parsley in the center. Arrange the toasts on a dish over which has been spread a folded napkin.
Beef. Beef a la Mode Cut off the under part of a round of beef, wipe and trim off the edges, place in a deep earthen dish and pour over it spiced vinegar. This spiced vinegar may be made as follows: Boil for five minutes a breakfast cupful of vinegar, with an onion chopped fine, a little salt, mustard, pepper, cloves, and allspice. Let the meat remain in this mixture for several hours, stirring it frequently; then dress it with ten or twelve strips of salt pork cut a third of an inch square, and as long as the meat is thick insert these strips with a large larding-needle, or bore a hole in the meat with a carving steel; or, if desired, larger incisions may be made and stuffed with breadcrumbs highly seasoned, with salt, pepper, onions, thyme, marjoram, etc., moistened with hot water, a little butter and a well beaten egg. Bind the beef into shape with a narrow strip of cotton cloth, in such a manner as to retain the stuffing, and dredge with flour, then cut up two onions, half a carrot and half a turnip, and fry in fat drippings until brown, and place in a stewpan. Brown the meat all over in the same fat, and place on a trivet in the pan; half cover with boiling water, adding a little mixed herbs tied in a muslin bag; cover loosely and simmer for four hours or until quite tender. Take out carefully and remove the strings, and put on a large dish, Skim off the fat from the gravy, add more seasoning, and thicken with wetted flour worked smooth, boil for eight or ten minutes and strain over the meat. Decorate with potato balls and small onions.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a canapé of shrimp toast, and a full braise of larded beef. Both are straightforward once a few Victorian conventions are translated.
- Shrimp butterOscar assumes you know it: cooked shrimp (traditionally the shells and heads too) pounded to a paste with an equal weight of softened butter, then pushed through a sieve. A food processor does the pounding; sieving is still what makes it smooth enough to spread thinly.
- "Crumb of bread"The soft interior of the loaf, crusts removed. Cut the rounds after frying, as directed, so the edges stay crisp and even; day-old white bread holds its shape better than fresh.
- Serve cold, assemble lateThe rounds must be fully cold before the butter goes on or it melts and slides. Assembled toasts hold an hour or two refrigerated at most before the bread softens.
- The folded napkinA period presentation convention for such dishes; it would also have absorbed any weeping butter and kept the rounds from sliding on a polished dish. Purely optional now.
- YieldA standard sandwich loaf gives roughly twenty two-inch rounds, enough for eight to ten people as a first bite with drinks.
- Beef à la Mode: cut and size"The under part of a round" is the bottom round or rump. Figure a 4-5 lb piece; a "breakfast cupful" of vinegar is about 8-10 oz, enough for a marinade but not a full cover, hence the instruction to stir it frequently.
- LardingSalt pork strips run through the meat with a larding needle keep a lean round from drying over four hours. Butchers rarely sell larding pork now; thick-cut unsmoked bacon or fatback cut into batons works, and a sharpening steel does open a serviceable channel as Oscar says.
- The trivetThe meat sits on a rack above the vegetables and is only half covered with liquid, so the top braises in steam rather than boiling. Keep the pot at a bare shiver; a rolling simmer turns a lean round stringy.
- Thickening the gravy"Wetted flour worked smooth" is a flour-and-water slurry, not a roux. The eight to ten minutes of boiling is not optional — it is what cooks out the raw starch taste.
Oscar Tschirky was never a chef; he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 book is less a record of his own cooking than a compendium of what a great American hotel kitchen of the 1890s was expected to produce, from French classics to plain roasts. Both dishes here show that range. The shrimp toast belongs to the era's enormous vocabulary of canapés — small fried or toasted bread rounds masked with a compound butter and garnished symmetrically, served at receptions and as the opening of long menus. Boeuf à la mode, by contrast, was already two centuries old and thoroughly naturalized in America: a larded, marinated, long-braised round that appears in English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, and which gave its name to the nineteenth-century "à la mode beef shops" most often noted in Philadelphia and New York. The larding needle and the muslin bag of herbs are the marks of a kitchen still working before the era of reliable refrigeration and tender feedlot beef, when a lean working animal's round needed both fat driven into it and hours of gentle heat to be worth serving.