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Pot-Roast Pie
Remove the seeds and parboil one medium-sized sweet green pepper in boiling water for five minutes.` Cut into thin slices and sprinkle a few in the bot- IO tom of an earthen baking-dish. Cover with thin slices of cold pot-roast. Add a few fine breadcrumbs, moisten with any of the pot-roast gravy at hand, or stock. Repeat until the dish is nearly filled.
Peel four good-sized tomatoes, if in season; cut in halves and place on top. Or the whole ones from a can may be used instead. Season thoroughly with salt and pepper and finish with a sprinkling of well-buttered crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven until the tomatoes are tender, covering for the first ten minutes. Serve in the bakingdish. Braised Meat Balls (from Meat Trimmings) 2 tablespoonfuls fine bread-crumbs 2 cups meat ¼ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful pepper 1 egg Carefully wipe, and remove most of the fat from, any tough ends of uncooked beefsteak, or other meat trimmings of beef or lamb, or both. Put them through a meat chopper or chop fine. Mix all together and form into balls this amount will make eight medium-sized ones. Brown lightly in a little bacon fat. Put one-half can of wellseasoned tomatoes in an earthen baking-dish or casserole. Add one cup each of carrots and celery cut in cubes, one slice of green pepper, one teaspoonful of salt, and one-quarter teaspoonful of pepper. Lay the meat balls on top, add any bacon fat left from browning them, and cover the dish tightly. Cook slowly in a moderate oven until the vegetables are tender-about two hours. Serve in the baking-dish.
A layered gratin of sliced leftover pot roast, built in the dish it is served from. The whole thing lives or dies on having enough gravy: dry slices of already-cooked beef will not release any moisture of their own.
- Moderate ovenRead that as roughly 350F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the bake is only long enough to heat it through, soften the tomatoes and set the crumbs: about 30 to 40 minutes, with the first ten covered as directed.
- Earthen baking-dishAny 1 1/2- to 2-quart stoneware, glass or enamelled cast-iron dish works. It goes to the table, so choose accordingly.
- Moisten generouslyThe hinge of the recipe. Cold pot roast is already cooked out; without enough gravy or stock between the layers the pie bakes dry and mealy. Add liquid at each layer until it pools slightly, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup in total for a filled dish.
- Sweet green pepperA bell pepper. The five-minute parboil softens it and takes the raw edge off before it goes into the layers; it is still worth doing.
- Canned tomatoesWhole canned tomatoes stand in for fresh, as the text allows, but drain them well or the dish floods. Halved fresh tomatoes will be tender in about half an hour at 350F.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh breadcrumbs with melted butter until each crumb is coated, about 2 tablespoons butter to 1 cup crumbs. Uncovering after the first ten minutes is what lets them brown.
- YieldFour servings from a filled 2-quart dish, assuming roughly a pound of sliced beef.
- Seasoning in the meat-ball formulaThe teaspoonful of pepper listed alongside a teaspoonful of salt for 2 cups of meat is out of proportion with the seasoning given for the vegetables in the same recipe, which calls for a quarter teaspoonful. Season the mixture to taste rather than following the figure.
Books of this kind belong to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the two world wars: the leftovers manual, organised not by course but by the cut you already have in the icebox. Pot roast was a standard economy joint, often producing more than one meal, and cookbooks of the period frequently followed a pot-roast recipe with instructions for its remains. The tomatoes here may be canned, as the text allows -- a sign of how far commercial canning had reached into the ordinary household pantry by the early twentieth century. The dish is called a pie in a looser sense: a filling baked in a dish under a topping, in this case buttered crumbs rather than pastry.