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Stewed Smoked Beef in Cream
Finely mince one pound and a quarter smoked beef; drop it in boiling water and cook for two minutes. Remove from the water and thoroughly drain. Have in a small saucepan two tablespoons melted butter, one and a half tablespoons flour. Stir briskly with a whisk for one minute, then heat up well; add one gill hot milk and one gill cream, mix well until boiling. Drop in the beef; season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper, half a saltspoon grated nutmeg; thoroughly mix and allow to boil for ten minutes. Pour into a hot, deep dish and serve.
This is the ancestor of American creamed chipped beef, written for a cook who had a slab of smoked beef to hand rather than a packet. Two measurements and one timing need attention before you start.
- GillOne gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/2 cup cream — one cup of liquid thickened with 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, which gives a pourable sauce rather than a paste.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg for the whole dish.
- Smoked beefWhat the book means is salt-cured, smoked, air-dried beef sliced thin — sold now as dried beef or chipped beef, often in a jar. A pound and a quarter is a great deal of it; half that weight suits a modern packet and a modern palate.
- The blanching is the pointThe two minutes in boiling water pulls out salt, and it is the step people skip. Dried beef today is still aggressively salty, so do not shorten it, and hold back the half teaspoon of added salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- Ten minutes of boiling is too longBoil a cream sauce that hard for ten minutes and it will break or catch, and the beef turns to leather. Bring it to a simmer, add the beef, and give it two or three minutes at a bare bubble to warm through and thicken.
- "Then heat up well"Read this as cooking the butter-and-flour roux another minute or two over low heat to lose the raw flour taste, without letting it colour. Add the milk and cream off the direct heat and whisk to smooth before returning it.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as written, or three generously. The "hot, deep dish" was for spooning over toast, split biscuits or boiled potatoes; it is thin enough to need something under it.
Smoked and dried beef was a keeping meat — cured to survive a pantry without refrigeration, then reconstituted in liquid before it could be eaten pleasantly, which is why the recipe opens by boiling it rather than by cooking it. Creaming such meat in a butter-and-flour sauce was a common nineteenth-century treatment for salted, shredded meats, and this version, with its nutmeg and cayenne, is seasoned more in the manner of a French white sauce than the plainer American "chipped beef on toast" it is related to. That dish went on to become a fixture of institutional and military cooking in the twentieth century, under a nickname not printable in a cookbook of this vintage. Filippini's International Cook Book collected dishes like this one under a broad geographical banner, and its measurements in gills and saltspoons reflect a period when American kitchens had not yet settled uniformly on the cup and the level teaspoon.