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Meat (Mince beef or mutton small)
Mince beef or mutton, small, with onions, pepper and salt; add a little gravy, put into scallop shells or small cups, making them three parts full, and fill them up with potatoes mashed with a little cream, put a bit of butter on the top and brown them in an oven.
BOILED BEEF (COLD).
Madame E. Pernet.
To use next day or when you like, for breakfast.
Melt a good lump of butter, about two ounces, over a slow fire, into a tablespoonful of flour; when it has simmered a little add some chopped onion (to taste) and a dessert spoonful of chopped parsley when brown season with pepper and add a little stock gravy, or water; mince the meat, put it in with the rest, and let it heat gradually; when nearly boiling thicken with a teaspoonful of flour. Add a little catsup or sauce of any kind.
Two ways with yesterday's roast: a shepherd's-pie-in-miniature baked in shells, and a quick onion-and-parsley hash. Both assume you already have cooked beef or mutton and a jug of gravy in the larder.
- Scallop shellsReal scallop shells were kept in Victorian kitchens as individual baking dishes. Ramekins, cocotte dishes or a large muffin tin do the same job; figure on 4-5 oz capacity each.
- Brown them in an ovenThe filling is already cooked, so the only aim is colour on the potato and butter: a hot oven, or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Three parts fullThree-quarters full with meat, then the potato piled on top. Overfill and the gravy boils out over the shell.
- Dessert spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons. So about 2 teaspoons of chopped parsley in the second recipe.
- The rouxTwo ounces of butter to one tablespoon of flour is very butter-heavy by modern proportions; the mixture will be loose rather than a proper roux. That is deliberate here, since the final teaspoon of flour does the thickening at the end.
- Mince the meat, not the mincerMince the meat -- 'mince' here means chopped small, as with a knife; meat put through a grinder or food processor tends to go pasty when reheated in gravy.
- Heat graduallyThe instruction matters. Cooked beef or mutton dropped into simmering sauce and boiled goes stringy; bring it up slowly and stop at the first bubble. Reheat leftover meat to 165F throughout.
- CatsupIn this period catsup was as likely to be mushroom or walnut as tomato, and was thin, dark and salty. Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of soy gives a closer effect than modern tomato ketchup.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, a pound of cooked meat will fill about four shells, or serve three to four as the hash.
Both of these belong to the large nineteenth-century literature on rechauffés — the respectable reuse of cold joints. Cookbooks of the period devoted whole chapters to making cold and minced meat palatable, and household advice of the day assumed a substantial joint would be eaten hot, then cold, then minced. The baked version here works on the same principle as shepherd's pie, only portioned into shells so each diner gets a browned top; shells were sold as kitchen equipment for this purpose. The second recipe carries an attribution to Madame E. Pernet, a named contributor — the kind of personal attribution found in collections of subscribers' receipts, which would account for the same page holding two overlapping methods for the same leftovers with no attempt to reconcile them.