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Beef En Miroton
Mrs. S. McMaster.
Cut thin slices of cold roast beef, and put them into a frying pan with some butter and six onions, turn the pan frequently, then mix a little broth, add pepper and salt, and after a few boils serve up hot.
A leftover-beef dish written in the telegraphic style of its period, which leaves out most of the quantities and all of the timing. The instructions read as though everything goes into the pan at once; it will be a much better dish if it does not.
- Cook the onions firstThe recipe implies beef, butter and onions all go in together, but six onions need 15 to 20 minutes over medium heat to soften and take colour. Get them sweet and golden, then add the beef at the end.
- The beef is already cookedCold roast beef needs only to be warmed through, two or three minutes in the sauce. Anything longer and thin slices of already-roasted meat turn grey and stringy.
- "A few boils"Read this as a brief simmer to bring the broth and pan butter together, not a rolling boil. There is no thickener in the recipe, so expect a thin buttery pan liquor rather than a sauce; once it has reduced a little around the onions, it is done.
- Quantities the recipe omitsFor six onions, figure roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter and about half a cup of broth. Six onions of modern supermarket size is a great deal for one meal; four medium may be closer to the intended proportion.
- Slice thin, across the grainThe whole point of a miroton is thin slices that reheat quickly and soak up the onion sauce. Thick slabs will not warm through before the outside overcooks.
- The traditional finishFrench versions of this dish are often finished with a spoonful of vinegar or a little mustard stirred into the onions, which cuts the butter and wakes up meat that has been sitting in the larder. This recipe leaves it out; it is worth considering putting back.
- YieldServes about four as written, depending entirely on how much roast is left. Serve with boiled or mashed potatoes to catch the sauce.
Miroton is a French bourgeois dish of sliced cooked beef reheated in an onion sauce, and it is generally understood as a way of bringing the Sunday joint back to the table on Monday and Tuesday without looking like the Sunday joint. Nineteenth-century cookbooks borrowed the name freely, usually stripping the French method down to its essentials — butter, onions, a little broth — and losing the vinegar or mustard that gives the classic version its edge; this recipe does without both. The contributor's name attached to the recipe suggests, though it does not prove, the kind of community cookbook in which each household sent in whatever it made reliably; a good leftovers dish was worth as much social credit as a cake. The presence of a French title on such a plain set of instructions may say something about the period too: an ordinary reheated-beef supper perhaps carried better with a name from the restaurant world.