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Minced Beef with Potato Border
To two cups of well - seasoned mashed potato add the yolks of two eggs. Beat together until very light and creamy. Form this mixture into a border on a round, flat baking-dish. Score the top.
Season two cups of any kind of cold chopped beef with one-half teaspoonful of onion-juice, obtained by pressing the cut surface of an onion against a grater and moving it slightly; one teaspoonful finely chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Add enough stock or milk to moisten it well. Place the meat inside of the potato border and brown lightly in a hot oven.
A Scallop of Roast Beef with Rice Season the rice with one teaspoonful of bacon fat to each cup of cooked rice used, and put a layer in a baking - dish. Cover with cold roast beef chopped not too fine, then a layer of sliced or stewed tomatoes, seasoned well with salt, pepper, and dots of butter. Repeat until the dish is nearly filled, and cover with buttered breadcrumbs. Brown lightly in oven. If sliced tomatoes are used, cook until these are tender.
Two related dishes run together in one entry: a minced beef and potato border, and a layered scallop of beef with rice. Both assume you already have cooked beef, and both are assembled cold and reheated, so the oven's job is browning rather than cooking.
- The hinge: moisten the meat properlyCold chopped beef dries out badly in a hot oven. Add stock or milk until the mixture is loose and glossy — roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup for two cups of meat — or the filling bakes into gravel inside a handsome potato ring.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425–450F. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to set the potato border and colour the scored ridges; the scallop with rice needs 25–30 minutes, longer if you are using raw sliced tomatoes and waiting for them to soften.
- Onion-juiceThe grater method described works, though a microplane or the fine side of a box grater gives cleaner juice with less waste. Half a teaspoon is a light touch — grated onion pulp or a teaspoon of very finely minced shallot serves the same purpose.
- Egg yolks in the potatoThe yolks are structural: they let the border hold a piped or spooned shape and take colour. Beat them into potato that is warm but not hot, and season assertively, since mashed potato that tastes fine alone reads bland against seasoned beef.
- Forming the borderA pastry bag with a large star tip does in a minute what the book expects you to do with a spoon, and the ridges brown better than a smooth surface. Scoring with a fork tine is the period equivalent.
- Reheating cooked meatBecause the beef goes in cold, make sure the centre of the filling reaches 165F rather than judging only by the browned top. A shallow, wide dish gets there faster than a deep one.
- Bacon fat in the riceOne teaspoon per cup of cooked rice is a seasoning, not a fat coating; butter or olive oil substitutes directly. Use rice that is dry and separate — freshly boiled, wet rice turns the layers to paste.
- YieldTwo cups of potato and two cups of beef feed three, or four with a green vegetable. The scallop is open-ended: the book simply says to build up layers until the dish is nearly filled, so scale it to the dish you have.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the Depression: whole volumes devoted to the second life of a joint of meat. Households roasted large cuts because large cuts roasted better and cost less per pound, which meant cold beef on Monday was a fact of domestic life rather than a failure of planning. The potato border here is a plain-cook's version of a French garnishing technique — pommes duchesse, mashed potato enriched with egg yolk and piped into shapes before browning — which is generally traced to nineteenth-century restaurant practice and filtered down into household books as a way of making rechauffé dishes look intentional. The word scallop in the second recipe is the older sense, still current in American usage: anything layered with crumbs or starch and baked, with no shellfish involved. Both dishes rely on the same quiet logic that shapes the whole book, that leftovers need moisture, seasoning and a browned surface, in that order.