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Fire Island Stew
A good Monday dinner when a Sunday roast and macaroni have preceded it.
Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, add one small sliced onion, and cook together until very slightly browned. To this add one and one-half cups of stewed tomatoes and let boil slowly for about fifteen minutes, or until the tomato is somewhat thickened. Then add one and one-half cups of cooked macaroni and let all cook together until well thickened. Just before the dinner hour, put into the saucepan one and one-half to two cups of remnants of the tender roast beef, cut small, and let heat. A very few minutes will suffice. Do not let the stew boil after the meat is added.
Beef Soufflé 2 cups chopped beef 2 eggs 1 cup fresh bread- 1 teaspoonful of crumbs 2 cups white sauce 1 teaspoonful onion- No. 2 (page 68) 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley juice Have the white sauce ready and cooled. Season the meat with salt, pepper, chopped parsley, and onion-juice. Mix meat, bread-crumbs, and white sauce well together. Separate the eggs and add the beaten yolks to the meat mixture. Beat the whites stiff and carefully fold them in. Turn the mixture into a well-buttered baking-dish and bake in a hot oven fifteen minutes. Serve at once in the dish in which it is baked.
Two related left-over beef dishes run together here, the stew first and a beef soufflé second, whose ingredient list has been garbled by the columns of the original page. Both depend on beef that is already cooked, so the only real work is reheating it without toughening it.
- The hinge: never boil the meatAlready-roasted beef that simmers in tomato will go stringy and dry within a few minutes. Add it at the very end, off a hard boil, and heat only until it is warm through — three or four minutes.
- Stewed tomatoesPut-up tomatoes, roughly broken, with their juice; these could be home-canned or shop-bought, both being ordinary by the turn of the century. A 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes is a little more than the cup and a half called for; drain off some liquid if you want the fifteen-minute reduction to happen on schedule.
- Cooked macaroniSunday's leftover macaroni is already soft, so it needs only to warm and absorb sauce. If you are boiling it fresh for this, stop well short of the package time — it will keep cooking in the tomato.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. On these quantities the stew will stretch to three, or four with bread on the table; the soufflé, with two cups of meat and two eggs, to about four.
- Reading the soufflé ingredientsThe columns have collided in printing. The list appears to have been 2 cups chopped beef, 1 cup fresh bread-crumbs, 2 cups white sauce No. 2 (page 68), 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoonful onion-juice, and a further "1 teaspoonful of" whose noun has dropped out of the type; the method calls for salt and pepper.
- White sauce No. 2The book's own recipe is on page 68 and is not given on this page; a sauce of this type is generally about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of milk. Cool it before the yolks go in, or they may scramble, and cool sauce also holds the folded whites better.
- Hot ovenIn period usage roughly 400-450F, so 425F is a fair reading. Fifteen minutes at that heat will set a shallow dish; a deeper one will need longer and may still be loose in the middle.
- Onion-juiceGrate an onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. It gives onion flavour without pieces that would weigh down the beaten whites.
- It is not a true souffléWith two cups of meat and crumbs to two egg whites, expect a light savoury pudding rather than a risen dome. Serve it straight from the oven anyway — what lift there is disappears fast.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished either side of 1900, when domestic-science writers set out to prove that thrift could be systematic rather than shameful: the Sunday roast was bought large on purpose, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were planned around its remains. The headnote here is the whole argument in one line: a roast and a dish of macaroni happened to be in the icebox together. Nothing in the stew is regional. What is genuinely of its moment is the confidence that macaroni, tomato and beef make a respectable dinner at all: boxed macaroni and canned or home-canned tomatoes had both become cheap and ordinary in American kitchens by then, and the pairing that would later be sold as a weeknight staple was still, in books like this one, a way of stretching meat.