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Beef En Daube
Procure a three-pound piece of beef from the rump, with a little fat on. Heat a tablespoon lard in a large saucepan, add the beef and brown on the range to a nice colour for about twelve minutes. Remove from the pan and lay on a plate. Mix two tablespoons flour in the pan, pour a half pint water, one gill red wine, one gill demi-glace and a tablespoon brandy. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, mix well until it comes to a boil, then add the beef. Scrape two small carrots, peel and clean two turnips, cut both in quarters, peel six small onions and six very small, sound, raw potatoes; add all these vegetables to the pan. Cover, boil for five minutes, then set in oven for one hour and fifteen minutes. Remove the pan to the oven door. Finely chop up one bean garlic, two branches parsley and a branch chervil and add to the pan. Dress the beef on a hot dish, lightly mix the vegetables in the pan, carefully skim the fat from the surface, pour all over the beef and serve.
A hotel-kitchen version of a Provençal daube, written for a cook who had demi-glace standing by. Two small translations and an oven number are all it really needs.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 325F, suits it, with the liquid at a bare simmer rather than a boil for the hour and a quarter.
- A gillHalf a cup. So the braising liquid is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup red wine, 1/2 cup demi-glace and a tablespoon of brandy.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy, kept as a standing preparation in professional kitchens of the period. Half a cup of well-reduced beef or veal stock does the same job; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate is the closest shortcut.
- "One bean garlic"Apparently a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail — one clove, not a head. It goes in near the end with the herbs so it stays sharp.
- "Remove the pan to the oven door"Instruction to pull the pan to the coolest part of the oven, or simply off the heat, so the chopped herbs steep without cooking to hay. Chervil in particular loses everything if it boils; flat parsley plus a little tarragon is a reasonable stand-in if you cannot find it.
- The potatoesWhole small potatoes and quartered turnips may not hold their shape through the eighty minutes of cooking the recipe calls for. Add them after the first 30-40 minutes if you want them whole rather than dissolved into the sauce, and use a waxy variety.
- SkimmingThe fat rise is the point of the final step, and it is easier cold. If you can, braise a day ahead, chill overnight, lift off the solid fat and reheat gently — the sauce is cleaner and the beef better.
- YieldThree pounds of rump with the vegetables serves four to six. Carve across the grain; the cut is lean enough that thick slabs read tough.
Daube is cooked in the daubière, the narrow-necked earthenware pot of Provence in which beef, wine and aromatics were sealed and left for hours over a low fire — traditionally with a lid dished to hold water or embers so the steam fell back into the pot; the pot takes its name from the dish, whose own origin is unsettled but often traced to Provençal or Italian adobar/addobbo. What appears here is the restaurant adaptation of that country dish: the meat is browned in lard rather than marinated overnight, the liquid is stiffened with flour and enriched with a ladle of demi-glace from the day's stockpot, and the whole thing is done in a little over an hour and a half. That reliance on demi-glace is the tell of a professional kitchen, where a brown sauce base was made once and drawn on all service long. The garnish of carrot, turnip, onion and potato cooked in the same pan makes it a one-dish braise in the bourgeois manner, and the last-minute parsley, chervil and garlic — a near relation of a persillade — is there to put back some freshness after the long, closed cooking.