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Beef Saute with Tomatoes
Cut the beef left over from yesterday into half-inch squares. Peel and cut in pieces five good-sized, fresh red tomatoes. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in an enamelled saucepan, add one finely chopped white onion and gently brown three minutes. Add beef and cook ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, then add tomatoes with a half teaspoon freshly chopped chives and one teaspoon tarragon vinegar. Season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and a saltspoon of grated nutmeg, and mix well. Cover pan and cook thirty-five minutes, occasionally mixing. Remove, transfer to a deep hot dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A leftover-beef saute from the era when a joint of roast beef was expected to reappear at least twice. The measurements are mostly workable; the vessel and the seasoning spoons need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon. So two saltspoons white pepper is about 1/2 teaspoon, and the nutmeg about 1/4 teaspoon "grated" meaning grated fresh from the whole nut.
- Enamelled saucepanThe point of specifying enamel was to avoid a reactive bare-iron or unlined copper pan turning the tomatoes and vinegar metallic. Any modern enamelled cast iron or stainless pan does the job.
- QuantitiesNo weight is given for the beef. Five good-sized tomatoes to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of cooked beef gives a reasonable balance; on that scale it would serve about four, though the recipe states no yield.
- The tomatoes do the workThere is no added liquid. The peeled fresh tomatoes must break down into the sauce, so keep the pan covered and the heat low enough that they release juice rather than scorch. Out of season, use canned whole tomatoes, drained of their heaviest liquid.
- The beef is already cookedThe ten minutes of stirring before the tomatoes go in is for browning and flavour, not for cooking through. Do not let already-roasted beef sit at a hard sizzle any longer than that or it will be stringy by the end of the thirty-five minutes.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easily made by steeping a sprig of tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon is a fair substitute; cider vinegar is too sweet here.
- ServingNothing is suggested alongside. Boiled or mashed potatoes, rice, or bread to take up the sauce is in keeping with the period.
This is a French household technique wearing an English name: boeuf saute aux tomates, one of the standard ways a thrifty kitchen turned cold roast into a second hot meal. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York; it first appeared in 1906, and later printings continued to circulate for years afterwards. The seasoning here is of a piece with French-trained professional cooking of the period: chives and tarragon vinegar rather than Worcestershire, white pepper rather than black, and a scrape of nutmeg, which nineteenth-century cooks used with beef more freely than we do. The instruction to begin with "the beef left over from yesterday" was not an apology; leftover-joint cookery took up substantial space in household books of the era.