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Stewed Beef
Remove the meat from the bones and place the bones and fat in a stewpan. Cut the meat into small pieces, and if not already cooked, dredge with salt, pepper and flour, and brown in a fryingpan with salt pork or drippings, then place in the stewpan with the bones. Next cut up two onions, a small turnip and half a carrot into dice of about a half inch in size, cook lightly in the drippings in the pan and afterwards add them to the stew: pour in boiling water sufficient to cover all, and simmer for two or three hours until the meat is quite tender. Pare six or eight small potatoes, soak them in cold water, pour boiling water over them and boil for five minutes. When the meat is done skim the stock and drain these potatoes, adding them to the stew. Season with salt and pepper to taste and remove all the bones before serving.
A plain braise built around leftover roast beef or a bone-in cut, written for a kitchen that always had bones and drippings on hand. The method holds up; a few of the assumptions behind it need translating.
- Start from the right cutThe recipe assumes either leftover cooked roast or raw meat still on the bone. If buying fresh, use 2-3 lb of bone-in chuck or shin, boned out with the bones kept for the pot. Meat that is already cooked skips the dredging and browning and goes straight in with the bones.
- Dredging means coatingToss the cubes in seasoned flour rather than sprinkling flour over them in the pan. The flour both browns and thickens the finished stock, which is the only thickening the dish gets.
- Drippings and salt porkRendered beef or bacon fat is meant; a couple of ounces of diced salt pork or bacon renders enough to brown the meat and gives the stew the faint cured note the original expects. Neutral oil works but the result is flatter.
- Brown in batchesA stewpan crowded with damp beef steams. Work in two or three loads over fairly high heat, then deglaze the frying pan with a little of the boiling water and pour that into the stewpan too.
- The vegetables go in twice overOnion, turnip and half a carrot cooked in the drippings are aromatics rather than garnish; after two or three hours much of the dice will have softened into the stock. The potatoes carry the body of vegetable in the finished dish.
- Why the potatoes are parboiled separatelyFive minutes in boiling water, then drained and added at the end, probably serves to keep them from breaking up and from clouding the stew with starch, though the recipe does not say. Small waxy potatoes hold best; allow roughly 15-20 minutes in the stew to finish, a figure the original does not give.
- Simmer, do not boilTwo to three hours at a bare shiver, lid ajar, on the stovetop, which is how the recipe is written. A rolling boil will make the meat stringy long before it becomes tender.
- SkimmingThe recipe directs a single skim of the stock once the meat is done, just before the potatoes go in; skimming fat and scum earlier in the cooking does no harm. If time allows, cooling the stew and lifting the set fat the next day is easier.
- YieldAbout four generous servings. The recipe offers no starch beyond the potatoes.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection contains a great deal of quiet household cookery of exactly this sort alongside the restaurant dishes it is better known for, among them the salad that bears the hotel's name. A stew that begins "remove the meat from the bones" reads as a leftovers recipe: it belongs to the era when a joint of beef was roasted for one meal and worked through for two or three more, and when bones and drippings were kept as a matter of course rather than bought. The technique itself — brown the meat, sweat root vegetables in the same fat, moisten with boiling water, simmer long, add potatoes at the end — is the standard Anglo-American beef stew of the nineteenth century, and comparable versions appear in Mrs. Beeton and in the American manuals that followed her. What is distinctive here is the precision about small things: the half-inch dice, the five-minute parboil, the instruction to remove every bone before the dish reaches the table.