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Beef Saute, a L'Anglaise
Pick off all the lean meat from the roast beef left over from Tuesday. Cut into one-inch squares, quarter of an inch thick.
Finely slice two white onions and lightly fry in a frying pan with a light tablespoon butter for eight minutes, then add the beef. Season with a teaspoon salt, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and half teaspoon white pepper. Toss well while cooking for five minutes; add one tablespoon flour, briskly stir; add two tablespoons vinegar, one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, a gill tomato sauce and a gill demi-glace; thoroughly mix, add one teaspoon chopped parsley, gently mix again and slowly cook for twenty minutes. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A leftover-roast dish from the era when a Sunday or Tuesday joint was expected to reappear twice more. The measurements are the main obstacle, along with a salt level pitched at a much larger portion than most cooks want.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe calls for a gill each of tomato sauce and demi-glace, so one cup of liquid total plus the vinegar and Worcestershire.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Nutmeg at that level is assertive in a dish this small; an eighth is closer to modern taste.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced, a standing item in a professional kitchen of the period. A well-reduced beef stock, or a good jarred demi-glace concentrate diluted as directed, does the job.
- Tomato sauceNot pasta sauce and not ketchup. It most likely means the classic tomato sauce of the professional kitchen: tomatoes cooked down with stock and aromatics. Passata simmered briefly with a little stock is a fair stand-in.
- SaltA full teaspoon is too much given the Worcestershire and the demi-glace, both already salty, and the beef is already seasoned from its roasting. Salt at the end instead.
- The beef is already cookedThe twenty-minute simmer is for the sauce, not the meat. Keep it at a bare tremble; a real boil will squeeze the slices dry and stringy. Slicing across the grain at the specified quarter-inch thickness matters more than the exact simmer time.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons in a cup of sauce reads as sharp to modern palates but is the point of the dish, which is essentially a mild devilled saute. Malt or cider vinegar suits it better than wine vinegar.
- YieldRoughly two generous or three modest servings, depending on how much lean meat the joint gave up.
The a l'anglaise tag here appears to signal English household practice rather than a French technique: a hashed or sauteed leftover joint, sharpened with vinegar and Worcestershire, of the same family as the devilled bones and hashed beef that filled out Victorian and Edwardian weekday tables. What marks this version as a professional's rewriting is the demi-glace and tomato sauce, both pulled ready-made from a restaurant larder, and the instruction to pick off all the lean meat from a specific day's roast, which places the dish in the economy of a kitchen where a large joint was cooked once and accounted for across several meals. The reference to Tuesday's beef suggests a book organised around daily menus, in which such a cross-reference would read as ordinary scheduling rather than a curiosity.