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Beef Saute, Bohemienne
Pick off all the meat from the roast beef left over from yesterday and cut it into half-inch-square pieces. Cut two scraped carrots and two peeled onions in halves and slice them very finely. Heat half ounce butter in a saucepan, add the carrots and onions, and gently brown for ten minutes, lightly stirring once in a while; then add two finely sliced peeled raw potatoes, brown for five minutes, add the beef, one bean crushed garlic, a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, three peeled crushed red tomatoes and a pint white broth. Mix well, cover the pan and set in the oven for one hour and a half, remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A leftovers dish from a period when a Sunday roast was expected to feed the household for days. The instructions are terse in the way professional French-trained cooks wrote for each other, so a few of the measures and one of the timings need translating.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. A moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, covered, so the liquid barely bubbles rather than boils, suits the hour and a half specified.
- The hinge: the beef is already cookedNinety minutes will reduce cubes of yesterday's roast to shreds. Build and braise the vegetable base first, then add the beef for the last 20-30 minutes, only long enough to heat through and take up the sauce.
- "One bean crushed garlic"A bean here means a clove; the usage probably renders the French gousse, which is a pod as well as a clove. One clove for four servings is restrained by modern taste; two or three is defensible.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg is a real presence in the finished dish, not a background note.
- White brothBouillon blanc is an unbrowned stock, made from veal or chicken bones and aromatics with no roasting. Light chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid dark beef stock, which will flatten the paprika and tomato.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted homemade broth and unseasoned leftover meat. With commercial stock, add half and correct at the end.
- Tomatoes"Three peeled crushed red tomatoes" means ripe summer fruit. Out of season, roughly a cup to a cup and a half of canned crushed tomatoes gives a truer result than pale fresh ones.
- Yield and servingServes about four with roughly a pound of picked-over beef. "Dress on a hot dish" means mounded on a warmed platter; bread or plain boiled rice takes up the sauce, since the potatoes are in the stew rather than beside it.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and it belongs to the enormous class of professional recipes written to use up cooked meat without admitting it. Filippini cooked at Delmonico's in New York and wrote in the language of the French kitchen brigade, which is why the beef is a sauté even though it spends ninety minutes braising in the oven. The name "Bohemienne" is best read as a menu label rather than a claim of Czech ancestry: in French kitchen usage of the period, garnishes and preparations were christened after places and peoples fairly loosely, and the paprika and tomato may be what earned this one its tag, though no source states so. The real subject of the recipe is thrift. A household roasting a large joint on Sunday needed a repertoire for Monday and Tuesday, and the carrot-onion-potato base with a pint of stock stretches a small amount of meat across a family table.