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Beef Braise, Japanese
Procure a three-and-a-half-pound piece of beef rump with the fat on one side only. Mix on plate a tablespoon salt, teaspoon curry powder and half teaspoon freshly crushed black pepper, then rub beef all over with it, place in braising pan with two tablespoons melted lard, then cook on brisk fire until a light brown. Add a mirepoix to the pan, and brown for ten minutes, pour in a pint white broth two gills pure tomato juice and a gill demi-glace. Neatly trim both ends of twelve fresh okras, place on a plate and add trimmings to beef, cover pan and set in oven for two hours, being careful to turn and baste quite frequently meanwhile. Remove, dress on a hot dish, skim fat from surface of gravy, then let reduce on fire to two gills and keep hot. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add okras, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and three saltspoons curry powder, cook on fire for fifteen minutes, tossing once in a while, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, arrange them around beef, strain sauce through Chinese strainer over, sprinkle a tablespoon grated, cooked ham all and serve.
A classic French pot braise dressed up with curry powder and okra, written for a professional kitchen that already had stock and demi-glace on hand. Translate the vessels and the stockpot assumptions and it works as written.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup and the finished sauce reduces to one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: the okra gets half a teaspoon of pepper and three-quarters of a teaspoon of curry powder.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a two-hour covered braise on a 3.5 lb rump, around 325F suits; a bare simmer inside the pan is what you want, not a boil.
- Brisk fireThe initial browning is done over high heat on the stovetop, in the same braising pan, before any liquid goes in. The recipe asks only for a light brown.
- MirepoixNot specified here: roughly diced onion, carrot and celery, perhaps two cups total. Cut it large so it does not disintegrate over two hours.
- White broth and demi-glaceWhite broth is unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Demi-glace is reduced brown sauce; a half-cup of good reduced beef stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate made up thick, stands in. Since a full tablespoon of salt already went onto the meat, unsalted stock is the safer choice or the reduced sauce may come out too salty.
- The saltA tablespoon of salt on 3.5 lb of beef is at the upper edge of a dry rub and assumes salt-free stock and a sauce that is skimmed and strained rather than reduced hard. If your stock is salted, cut the rub to two teaspoons.
- Okra timingTwenty-five minutes of butter-frying and oven time is more than fresh okra needs. Saute the trimmed pods eight to ten minutes over medium-high until browned in spots and just tender; long wet cooking with stirring tends to bring out the mucilage, and dry heat with minimal stirring helps limit it. The trimmed ends go into the braising liquid with the beef.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works; press the mirepoix lightly to extract the liquid but do not push the vegetables through.
- YieldServes six generously. The grated cooked ham scattered over at the end is a garnish, not a seasoning, so use a good dry-cured or baked ham grated on the fine side of a box grater.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose International Cook Book gathered several thousand recipes under national headings. The heading here tells you more about 1906 New York than about Japan: the dish is a straightforward French braisé with mirepoix, white broth and demi-glace, and what earns it the label is the curry powder, which turn-of-the-century American and European kitchens treated as a generic marker of the Far East regardless of origin. Curry powder itself was an Anglo-Indian commercial blend, and okra had reached those kitchens by way of the American South and the Caribbean, so the dish is a genuinely transatlantic invention wearing a borrowed name. Filippini's national sections routinely worked this way, applying one or two recognisable seasonings to a French technique, and they are a useful record of how a professional kitchen of the period imagined foreign cooking rather than how it was actually done.