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Cookery
Madame E. Pernet.
Take your bones, and stew them in a little water with an onion, some salt and pepper, and, if you like, a little savoury herbs; when the goodness is all out of the bones, and it tastes nice, thicken the gravy with a teaspoonful of corn starch, and if it is not very strong put in a bit of butter, then place your stew pan on the hot hearth, and put in your slices of meat. Warm but not boil. Serve with toasted bread.
This is a Victorian rechauffé — cold roast meat revived in a gravy built from its own bones. The whole thing turns on the last line: the meat is warmed through in the gravy, never simmered in it.
- Why it must not boilThe slices are already cooked. Boiling drives out what moisture the muscle fibres still hold and turns roast beef or lamb grey and stringy in a couple of minutes. Have the gravy properly hot before the meat goes in, and keep the pan hot enough that the meat heats right through rather than merely tepid, without letting it return to a rolling boil.
- The hot hearthA hearthstone beside the fire held pans at well under a simmer. The nearest modern equivalent is the lowest setting on the smallest burner, or the pan pulled off the heat entirely with a lid on for five minutes.
- Stewing the bonesLeftover roast bones, cracked or sawn so the marrow is exposed, covered by an inch or so of water. Give them 2 to 3 hours at a slow simmer for a stock with real body; a quick 30 minutes yields flavoured water. Strain it and skim the fat before thickening.
- Corn starchCornstarch, and a teaspoonful will lightly thicken about a cup of liquid — enough for a thin gravy rather than a coating one. Slake it in a spoonful of cold water first, then whisk it into the hot stock and let it cook a minute to lose the raw starch taste.
- Savoury herbsIn this period that means thyme, parsley stalks, a bay leaf, perhaps marjoram — not the herb we now sell as summer savory, though that would not be wrong either. Add them to the bones and strain them out.
- If it is not very strongThe butter is there for richness where the bones were thin — a knob whisked in off the heat at the end will do more for the gravy's texture than the same butter added early.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named ladies of the city and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest of the Canadian community fundraising cookbooks; recipes like this one, credited to Madame E. Pernet, arrive with a contributor's voice still attached. What she is describing is a réchauffé, the reheated dish that was a fixed point of the nineteenth-century household economy: a large joint was roasted once, eaten hot, then eaten cold, and finally the trimmings were warmed in a gravy drawn from its own bones. Cookery writers of the period, Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton among them, gave the practice sustained attention — a chapter in Acton, a long run of cold-meat recipes in Beeton — and repeated the same warning: that reheated meat must be warmed and not cooked a second time.