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Beef a La Mode
Procure a three-pound piece tender rump of beef, nicely trim all around and insert a few thin strips larding pork. Place the meat in a basin, season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, adding one gill vinegar, one gill claret, one bay leaf, a saltspoon thyme and a sliced onion. Let them marinade for four hours, turning over once in a while. Take up the beef, drain well, place in a saucepan with one ounce butter and let brown until a nice colour. Then place it on a hot dish.
Add one ounce flour to the butter of the pan, briskly stir and let get a nice brown; add the marinade liquor, with one gill tomato sauce and one gill demi-glace. Mix well and let come to a boil. Skim all the fat from the surface of the sauce; place the beef in the sauce, add two scooped carrots-in Parisian potato shape-twelve very small sound onions, previously browned in half a tablespoon butter for two minutes, and a clove crushed garlic. Cover the pan and place in a hot oven to braise for two hours. Remove, dress the beef on a hot dish, carefully skim the fat from the gravy, arrange the carrots and onions in groups around the dish, strain the sauce over the beef and serve.
A classic French braise written in restaurant shorthand: the sauce is built in the pan, the garnish cooked with the meat. Two things need attention before you start — the oven temperature and the demi-glace.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so the marinade is 1/2 cup vinegar and 1/2 cup claret, and the sauce takes 1/2 cup tomato sauce plus 1/2 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, here of dried thyme. One ounce of flour is a scant 1/4 cup; one ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- The oven is too hot as writtenA "hot oven" in 1906 meant something in the region of 400-450F, which will boil a covered braise dry and toughen the meat. Braise at 325F, tightly covered, and judge by feel rather than the clock — a 3 lb rump usually wants 2 1/2 to 3 hours until a fork slides out with no resistance.
- Demi-glaceClassically a brown sauce (espagnole) reduced with brown stock, kept on hand in a professional kitchen and the backbone of the sauce here. Use a good homemade brown stock reduced by half, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate; plain canned broth will leave the sauce thin and flat.
- Larding porkStrips of fresh unsmoked pork fat (fatback or salt pork rinsed of its cure), pushed through the meat with a larding needle. Rump is a lean cut, so this genuinely helps; thin strips of unsmoked bacon or a barding sheet of fat tied over the top are workable substitutes.
- The cut"Tender rump" here means a solid piece from the rump or bottom round, not a tender steak cut. Ask for a rump roast or top-of-the-round tied into a compact shape so it braises evenly.
- Parisian potato shapeBalls cut with a melon baller, or carrots turned into small olive shapes with a paring knife. Two carrots' worth of scooped pieces is a modest garnish; three or four carrots is more in line with modern appetites.
- Skim twice, and mean itThe recipe says to skim before the braise and again at the end, and the sauce depends on it. With a floured pan sauce the fat will not separate cleanly on the plate, so lift it off the surface with a ladle, or chill the strained sauce briefly and lift the cap.
- YieldThree pounds of boneless beef with vegetables serves four to six. It reheats better than most braises; cool the meat in its sauce and slice it cold, then warm the slices through in the gravy.
Boeuf à la mode — beef "in the fashion" — is one of the oldest set pieces of French bourgeois cooking: a large piece of beef larded, marinated in wine and vinegar, browned and then braised slowly with carrots and small onions, served either hot in its sauce or cold in the jelly the braise leaves behind. It gave its name to the boeuf à la mode shops of nineteenth-century Paris, which sold the dish by the portion, and it is a close relative of the American pot roast, which keeps the method while dropping the larding, the claret and the reduced stock. This version belongs to a hotel and restaurant tradition rather than a domestic one: the casual call for a gill of demi-glace assumes a kitchen with stock already reduced and waiting, which is exactly what The International Cook Book, compiled out of Delmonico's-era professional practice, took for granted. The phrase survives in English in a wholly unrelated sense — pie à la mode — where "in the fashion" came to mean simply "with ice cream."