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Beef or Veal Stewed with Apples
Mrs. James Beaty.
Rub a stewpan with butter; cut the meat in thin slices, and put in with pepper, salt, and apple, sliced fine; some would add a little onion. Cover it tight, and stew till tender.
A nineteenth-century recipe stripped to its bones: no quantities, no times, no heat. What it is describing is a dry-lidded braise in which the apples supply all the liquid.
- The hinge: no added waterNothing goes into the pan but butter, meat, seasoning and fruit. The apples must release their juice before the pan runs dry, so the lid has to seal well and the heat has to be very low — a bare tremble, not a simmer. On a modern stove that means the lowest setting with a diffuser, or a low oven; the recipe itself specifies no heat level.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan with a close-fitting lid. A heavy enamelled cast-iron casserole or Dutch oven is a close equivalent; thin stainless will scorch the sugar in the apples.
- Proportions, since none are givenA workable reading is about 1½ lb meat to 1 lb apples, one small onion, and roughly a tablespoon of butter for rubbing the pan. More apple than that and the dish turns to sauce.
- Cut of meat"Thin slices" of stewing beef means something like chuck or blade cut across the grain about ¼ inch thick; for veal, shoulder. Modern lean steak cut this thin will simply toughen — the recipe wants collagen.
- ApplesUse a tart apple that holds some shape: Bramley collapses into purée, which is not wrong here but changes the dish. Northern Spy, Granny Smith or a firm russet keeps identifiable pieces. Peel and core.
- Timing"Till tender" is 1½ to 2 hours for beef chuck, closer to 1 hour for veal shoulder. Check after 30 minutes that liquid has appeared; if the pan is dry, add a few spoonfuls of stock rather than letting it catch.
- SeasoningPeriod pepper-and-salt here is doing all the work against sweet fruit. A little cider vinegar or a squeeze of lemon at the end sharpens the dish if the apples used are less tart than an old cooking variety might have been.
- YieldFour servings at the proportions above. It wants potatoes, or bread, to catch the apple-thickened juices.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian charitable cookbooks, drawing on contributed household recipes signed with the contributor's married name as well as other printed sources. That format may explain the terseness here: the quantities and times that a stranger needs were never on the page. Cooking meat with apples was not a novelty in Ontario kitchens; apples were widely available as a preserved fruit through the Canadian winter, and pairing them with beef or veal is the same instinct that puts apple sauce beside pork or apples into a Northern European braise. The instruction to "rub a stewpan with butter" rather than fry the meat marks it as a fuel-thrifty dish, meant to sit at the cool end of a wood range and look after itself.