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Beef Saute, Lyonnaise
Cut all the meat from the roast beef left over from yesterday in half-inch-square pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter or lard in a black frying pan, add two finely sliced onions and lightly fry five minutes, then add the beef. Season with a light teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cook ten minutes, tossing once in a while, then add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, sprinkle over a tablespoon flour. Stir well, then pour in two tablespoons vinegar and two gills broth. Mix well and cook ten minutes, mixing quite frequently meanwhile. Pour in a deep dish and serve.
A leftover-roast dish that lives or dies on the onions: cooked properly they melt into the sauce, rushed they stay raw and sharp. Everything else here is straightforward, but a few of the measures need translating.
- Two gills of brothA gill is generally taken as half a cup, so two gills is about a cup (240 ml); by British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, which would put it nearer 10 fl oz. Beef stock is the obvious choice; the liquid should just come up around the meat, not swim it.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or heavy carbon steel, which is what the phrase means. A thin nonstick pan will not brown the onions or the flour properly, and the browning is most of the flavour.
- The onions are the hingeFive minutes over the heat called for here is a bare minimum. Take them to soft and lightly golden — eight to ten minutes over medium — before the beef goes in, or the sauce tastes raw.
- Already-cooked beefThe meat is leftover roast, so the ten minutes of cooking is about heating and coating, not tenderising. Longer will only dry it out; cut the pieces a true half inch so they hold together.
- Flour and vinegarSprinkle the flour over and stir it for a minute in the fat before the liquid goes in, otherwise the sauce tastes pasty. Two tablespoons of vinegar is assertive — a plain red wine vinegar suits it; distilled white will read as harsh.
- SeasoningA "light teaspoon" of salt means a scant one. If the broth is commercial and salted, start with half and correct at the end.
- ParsleyHalf a teaspoon is meagre by current taste. A tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf, some of it added off the heat at the end, does more for the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of meat; roughly a pound of cooked beef would feed two generously or three with potatoes, which are a common accompaniment.
Lyonnaise, in French kitchen shorthand, simply means "with onions" — a nod to Lyon and the onion-heavy cooking of the Rhône valley, and the same tag attached to the fried potatoes that became familiar on American menus. This is a dish of thrift rather than of restaurants: the classic French treatment of yesterday's bœuf rôti, sliced or diced, revived with onion, a sharp splash of vinegar and enough flour to bind a little sauce. The nearer relative is bœuf mironton, the same rescue operation performed on boiled beef. Cookbooks of this period assumed a household roasted a large joint and then had to answer for it across several days, and the vinegar here does real work — it cuts the flatness that reheated beef always has.