Home › Dinner › Brown Beef, Lamb or Veal Stew
Brown Beef, Lamb or Veal Stew
3 pounds meat cut in medium sized pieces 3 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 tablespoon Karo, Blue Label 1/4 cup Mazola a 4 small onions 1½ cups scraped, sliced carrots 6 medium sized potatoes 2 quarts boiling water 1½ teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper In buying meat for stew, purchase round, shin or rump of beef; shoulder or breast of lamb; or neck, shin or shoulder of veal. Cut the meat into medium-sized pieces, dust with the cornstarch and put in kettle with the onion, Karo and Mazola. Brown the meat. Add water and simmer, closely covered, for an hour. Season, add the carrots and potatoes and simmer a second hour. If necessary, thicken with a little more cornstarch rubbed smooth with an equal amount of cold water, and serve plain, or with small dumplings.
A branded stew from a corn-products promotional booklet, which explains why cornstarch, corn syrup and corn oil all turn up in a dish that needs none of them. It works, but a few proportions and timings deserve adjusting.
- The hinge: brown in batchesThree pounds of dusted meat crowded into one kettle will steam rather than brown, and the cornstarch coating will go pasty. Work in two or three batches over fairly high heat, giving each piece room, and lift each batch out before starting the next.
- What the Karo is doingHalf a tablespoon of light corn syrup is presumably there to help the meat colour, since sugars brown readily. Any comparable sweetener would do the same job; the quantity is small enough that the stew does not taste sweet.
- MazolaCorn oil, then a relatively new product. Any neutral oil with a decent smoke point serves, and beef dripping or a mix of oil and butter gives more flavour.
- Two quarts is a lot of waterEight cups over 3 lb of meat produces something closer to a thin soup than a stew, which is why the recipe ends by suggesting more cornstarch. Start with enough to barely cover, about 4 to 5 cups, and you will not need the extra thickening.
- Potatoes do not want an hourSix medium potatoes simmered a full second hour will collapse into the broth. Add carrots at the one-hour mark and potatoes about 30 to 35 minutes before serving.
- Adjust the time to the cutTwo hours suits shin, round or rump of beef. Lamb shoulder or breast and veal shoulder are tender in appreciably less; check at 75 minutes and add the vegetables when the meat is nearly there.
- SeasoningA teaspoon and a half of salt for 3 lb of meat plus vegetables and several cups of liquid is modest by current taste. Season at the point the recipe says, then taste and correct again at the end.
- YieldServes six to eight generously. If you make the dumplings, drop them onto the surface and cover tightly for the last 15 minutes without lifting the lid.
This comes from the era when milling and refining companies published free or near-free cookbooks in which their own products appeared in every recipe, whether the dish called for them or not. Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, Karo syrup and Mazola oil were all made by the Corn Products Refining Company, and a booklet like this one existed to establish corn oil in particular as an ordinary kitchen fat at a time when American cooks reached first for lard or butter. The stew itself is much older than the branding: dusting cheap collagen-rich cuts with starch or flour, browning them, and simmering them for a couple of hours with root vegetables is the standard method behind ragoût and boeuf bourguignon alike. What is notable is the shopping advice, which names the exact cuts by animal — round, shin, rump, neck, breast, shoulder — a reminder that home cooks then dealt with a butcher who would sell them any of it.