Ragout of Beef
For six pounds of the round, take half dozen ripe tomatoes, cut up with two or three onions in a vessel with a tight cover, add half a dozen cloves, a stick of cinnamon, and a little whole black pepper; cut gashes in the meat, and stuff them with half pound of fat salt pork, cut into square bits; place the meat on the other ingredients, and pour over them half a cup of vinegar and a cup of water; cover tightly, and bake in a moderate oven; cook slowly four or five hours, and, when about half done, salt to taste. When done, take out the meat, strain the gravy through a colander and thicken with flour. Mrs. D. W. R., Washington City.
A pot roast in all but name: six pounds of beef round larded with salt pork and braised for hours over tomatoes and onion. The instructions are complete enough to follow, but a few of the assumptions behind them need stating.
- The hinge is the tight coverRound is lean and has almost no fat of its own, so all the moisture in the pot has to stay in the pot. Use a heavy Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid; if the lid rocks at all, lay a sheet of foil under it before it goes into the oven.
- "A moderate oven"325 to 350F. At the lower end of that range the five-hour version is realistic for a six-pound roast; at 350F start checking for fork-tenderness at three and a half hours.
- Larding with salt porkThe half pound of fat salt pork cut in squares and pushed into gashes bastes the lean round from the inside. Modern salt pork is broadly comparable to what was meant. Blanch it briefly if it seems very salty; the salt it carries may be part of why salting the dish is deferred to the halfway mark.
- Six ripe tomatoesAbout 2 lb, or a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes drained of most of its juice. Nineteenth-century tomato varieties were generally smaller than a modern beefsteak, so canned plum tomatoes may be closer than fresh supermarket fruit out of season.
- Whole spices, not groundSix cloves and a stick of cinnamon in a pot this size read as warmth rather than as dessert spice. Tie them with the peppercorns in a scrap of muslin so you can pull them out before straining.
- Liquid levelHalf a cup of vinegar and a cup of water sounds scant, but the tomatoes and onions release a great deal more as they collapse. Cider vinegar suits it better than distilled white.
- Straining and thickeningPush the vegetables through the colander rather than discarding them — the pulp is most of the body of the sauce. For the flour, whisk two to three tablespoons into a little cold water or soft butter before it meets the hot liquid.
- YieldSix pounds of round serves ten to twelve, and the sliced meat reheats well in its own gravy. Slice across the grain; round left whole and carved with the grain will seem tough however long it cooked.
Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the nineteenth century American cookbooks used the word loosely for almost any long-simmered meat dish with a sauce. This one is really a larded braise of the kind that made cheap, hard-working cuts palatable: round is a well-worked muscle that rewards nothing but slow, moist heat. The salt pork pushed into the gashes does the work that marbling does in a rib roast, a technique generally traced to French lardons and standard in English and American kitchens well before this book appeared. The Dixie Cook-Book credits contributors by initials and city — "Mrs. D. W. R., Washington City" — which is a reminder that these volumes gathered household practice rather than professional recipes, and that their reach extended well beyond the South named on the cover.