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Beef with Tomatoes
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Eight pounds fresh plate beef, second cut broiled; boil tender two quarts tomatoes, three cloves, plenty butter , pepper and salt; when cooked nicely and thick , strain through a colander and pour over your beef and serve hot or cold.
A contributed recipe with the telegraphic punctuation typical of the subscription cookbooks: the beef and the tomato sauce are cooked separately, then married at the table. A few things need translating before you start.
- The hinge: this is a long, slow braise, not a broilThe hinge: cook it gently, not under a broiler -- Plate beef is tough, fatty and full of connective tissue, and broiling alone will not make it tender. The recipe's own instruction is "boil tender": three to four hours at a bare simmer, until a fork slides out with no resistance. "Broiled" may be a slip for "boiled", or may indicate the meat was browned first; the text does not settle it.
- What plate beef isThe plate is the belly cut behind the brisket, sold now as short plate or navel end; what a nineteenth-century butcher meant by "second cut" is not certain, though it denotes a particular portion of the plate. Butchers rarely label it, so ask for short plate, or substitute brisket point or boneless chuck of the same weight.
- Two quarts of tomatoesAbout four pounds of fresh ripe tomatoes, or a little over two 28-ounce cans with their juice to make up the two quarts. The book's era assumed either garden tomatoes in season or canned tomatoes, which were increasingly cheap and widely available by the 1870s.
- Three cloves means three whole budsNot three teaspoons of ground clove. Whole cloves are fished out or caught by the colander at the end; ground clove in that quantity would overwhelm eight pounds of beef.
- "Plenty butter"Four to six tablespoons is a reasonable reading of "plenty", though the recipe gives no quantity. Note that here it goes in with the tomatoes at the start of the boil, not off the heat at the end.
- Straining through a colanderA colander, not a fine sieve — you are pushing the pulp through and leaving skins, seeds and the cloves behind. Work the tomatoes with the back of a ladle; expect a loose purée rather than a smooth coulis.
- Reduce further than feels necessary"Cooked nicely and thick" is the whole point. Tomatoes give up a great deal of water, and a thin sauce will simply run off the meat. Let the strained purée go back on the heat until it mounds on a spoon.
- Yield and servingEight pounds of plate beef feeds twelve to sixteen. Served cold, as the recipe permits, it slices better after a night's chilling under its sauce.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes solicited from local housewives and sold for charitable benefit, which is why nearly every entry carries a contributor's name like Mrs. P. B. Ayer's and why the instructions assume a reader who already knows how to cook. Beef with a strained tomato sauce belongs to the moment when tomatoes are often said to have shed their long American reputation as suspect or merely ornamental; commercial canning, which expanded sharply after the Civil War, made two quarts of them a plausible year-round proposition for a city household rather than a late-summer luxury. The cut is equally revealing s on the carcass, and a recipe that turns eight pounds of it into a dish fit to serve cold the next day is household economy written down.