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Beef, Roumanienne
Remove all the meat from the beef left over from yesterday and cut in half-inch pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a saucepan, add one finely chopped onion and one seeded, chopped, green pepper, gently brown three minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Cut three ounces raw calf's liver into quarter-inch-square pieces, add to the pan and fry three minutes, again stirring meanwhile. Add two ounces raw rice and lightly brown three minutes. Moisten with a pint of water and a gill of tomato juice, and let boil five minutes, then add the beef. Season with light teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, mix well, cover the pan. Set in the oven forty-five minutes. Remove, transfer the beef into a baking dish. Cut half a medium, peeled eggplant into exceedingly thin slices. Season with half teaspoon salt, arrange the egg plant over the beef. Sprinkle two tablespoons of bread crumbs over, add one half ounce butter in very little bits on top of all, set in the oven twenty minutes. Remove and serve.
A leftover-beef dish built like a pilaf and finished like a gratin. The rice is the part that needs watching, since the original gives no oven temperature and the liquid ratio is tight.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. The first stage is a covered braise and the second a gratin finish; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits both.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Tomato juice here is a seasoning acid rather than the main liquid.
- Rice and liquidTwo ounces of raw rice is about a third of a cup, going into a pint of water plus the tomato juice. That is a generous ratio, and after 45 minutes covered the rice should be soft and the mixture moist but not soupy. If it looks dry at the halfway point, add a splash of hot water rather than letting the bottom catch.
- The beefThis is a use-it-up recipe for cold roast or boiled beef, already cooked. It goes in at the end of the stovetop stage, after the liquid has boiled five minutes, and then braises with the rice in the oven.
- Calf's liverThree ounces, cut small, dissolves into the rice and gives the dish its depth. Order it from a butcher, or substitute beef liver, which is stronger. Fry it only the three minutes specified, since liver cooked hard becomes grainy.
- LardTwo tablespoons of rendered pork fat. Butter or a neutral oil will work in its place.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked and not hot. Stir it in off the heat or with liquid already in the pan, as paprika scorches and turns bitter in hot fat.
- The eggplantSliced "exceedingly thin" for a reason: the top layer only gets 20 minutes uncovered, which is not long enough to soften thick rounds. Aim for slices no more than an eighth of an inch, salt them as directed, and overlap them so they steam over the rice.
- YieldServes three to four as a main course, depending on how much beef yesterday left behind.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a sprawling collection by the longtime Delmonico's chef. "Roumanienne" appears to be a menu-French coinage for Romanian, in keeping with the standard convention of the period, when even a Balkan dish was labelled in kitchen French. The combination itself reads as broadly Danubian rather than strictly Romanian: paprika, green pepper, rice and eggplant are the shared vocabulary of Hungarian, Romanian and Ottoman-influenced cooking, and the layered eggplant top is a cousin of the many baked eggplant-and-meat dishes found across the region. Its place in the book is telling in another way, too. Filippini wrote extensively for the American household as well as the restaurant, and this is a made-over dish, built on "the beef left over from yesterday" and stretched with rice and a few ounces of cheap liver. The nationality is decoration; the economy is the point.