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Beef, Paysanne
Pick all the meat from the ribs of beef left over from yesterday, and cut in half-inch pieces and keep on a table. Cut two medium, white onions in half-inch pieces, place in a sauteuse with two tablespoons lard, and brown to a nice golden colour, lightly stirring meanwhile. Sprinkle over two tablespoons flour, stir well, moisten with a gill claret and three gills broth, and let boil for ten minutes. Add the beef, season with a light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, a teaspoon French mustard, a half teaspoon chopped chives and a tablespoon sherry, mix well and cook for thirty-five minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Remove, dress the beef in a hot deep dish and serve.
A leftover-roast dish built on a quick brown roux sauce. The measurements are all early-1900s restaurant shorthand, and the timing assumes the beef is already cooked.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So one gill of claret is 1/2 cup, and three gills of broth is 1 1/2 cups.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is 3/4 teaspoon — a genuinely peppery dish, and worth starting with half that if your pepper is freshly ground.
- SauteuseA sauteuse is a straight- or sloping-sided sauté pan, wider than a saucepan. Any wide, heavy pan with a lid works; you want surface area for browning the onions.
- ClaretClaret meant red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red does the job — the half cup mostly disappears into the sauce.
- French mustardIn books of this period this generally meant a smooth Dijon-style prepared mustard rather than the sweetened yellow condiment. Prolonged fierce boiling is usually said to flatten its bite, so a bare simmer suits it.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard gives the right flavour and browns well, but butter, beef dripping or oil substitute directly.
- The hinge — it is a reheat, not a braiseThe beef is already roasted. Thirty-five minutes at a bare simmer lets it take up the sauce; at a rolling boil it turns dry and stringy. Keep the surface barely trembling and stir now and then so the flour does not catch.
- YieldThe meat off a rib roast's worth of leftovers with about two cups of liquid feeds three to four. Serve over boiled potatoes, noodles or bread, since the sauce is the point.
Paysanne is simply French for "peasant-style," a kitchen label attached to plain, rustic treatments built on onions, a brown sauce and whatever the household already had. This book — Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book — belongs to the era when a chef trained in the Delmonico's tradition still expected the domestic reader to have a rib roast on Sunday and a plan for it on Monday. Recipes titled "left-over" or "réchauffé" are a familiar feature of period cookbooks, and the technique here is the standard one: a roux browned with onion, slackened with wine and stock, sharpened with mustard, then used to carry cold meat rather than to cook it. The tablespoon of sherry added at the end, alongside the claret, finishes the sauce.