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June 21
Menu: Fried Flounders, Lemon Sauce; Beef, a la Mode; Cauliflower au Gratin; Creamed Potatoes; Fruit Chartreuse; Coffee Beef, a la Mode-3 pounds lean beef, larding bacon, 1 quart stock, 1 glass claret, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 carrots, 1 chopped onion, 10 button onions, sprig parsley, piece thyme, 1 bay leaf, juice half lemon, 2 cloves, salt and pepper to taste. Trim, bone, and lard meat, place it in basin with wine, lemon juice, chopped onion, cloves, salt, pepper parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and let it stand 2 hours, basting frequently. Melt Crisco in stewpan, drain beef, and fry it brown, and at same time lightly fry button onions. Remove both from stewpan, put in flour, and fry until it acquires a nut-brown color; add stock and wine marinade in which meat was soaked, and stir until boiling. Replace meat and onions, season to taste, add carrots thinly sliced, cook gently for 3 hours, stirring and skimming occasionally. When done place on hot dish, strain sauce over, and garnish with groups of onions and carrots.
A classic braise written in the shorthand of a hotel kitchen, where stock and larding bacon were always on hand. The hinge is the flour: it must be cooked to a genuine nut-brown before any liquid goes in, or the sauce will taste raw and pasty for the whole three hours.
- A glass of claret"Claret" is dry red Bordeaux, and a wineglass in cookbooks of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup), though the measure was never standardised. Any dry, moderately tannic red will do the same work.
- Larding baconThis is fresh unsmoked pork fatback cut into long strips and threaded through the meat with a larding needle. Few butchers stock it now; salt pork strips, blanched to pull the salt, are the usual stand-in, or skip larding and use a well-marbled chuck or top blade roast instead of true lean beef.
- Marinate coldThe recipe does not say where the basin should stand. Do the marinating in the refrigerator, covered, and turn the meat rather than basting it every few minutes.
- StewpanA heavy Dutch oven or braiser with a tight lid. A quart of stock plus the marinade will cover 3 lb of beef only partway, which is correct for a braise; keep the lid on so the exposed top does not dry.
- Crisco and the rouxThree tablespoons of any neutral fat works. Cook the flour in it over medium heat, stirring, until it is the color of a shelled hazelnut, roughly 6-8 minutes, then add the liquid off the heat to avoid lumps.
- Three hours, but checkOn a modern burner, hold the pot at a bare simmer, or move it to a 325F oven. Start testing at two hours; the meat is done when a fork slides out with no resistance. Modern beef often gets there sooner than 1913 beef did.
- Button onions and carrotsButton onions are small boiling onions or pearl onions, peeled whole. Sliced carrots added at the start will collapse into the sauce over three hours; if you want them as garnish, as the recipe intends, add a second batch in the last 30 minutes.
- Finishing and yieldStraining the sauce is worth doing, since the herbs, cloves and chopped onion will have gone to shreds. Reduce the strained liquid briefly if it seems thin. Serves 4 to 6.
Beef à la mode is the French boeuf à la mode — beef "in the fashion" — the larded, wine-marinated pot roast, and it had been in English-language cookbooks for well over a century by the time it turned up here. Its appearance is generally traced to the year-of-menus format Marion Harris Neil published for Procter & Gamble as A Calendar of Dinners, though it is not really about the dish at all: Procter & Gamble had just introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a shortening and needed to persuade cooks that it could stand in for butter, lard and drippings anywhere in the repertoire, including a browning fat for a French braise. The "Calendar of Dinners" ran a full year of menus with Crisco threaded through them, a form of advertising that also functioned, then as now, as a useful record of what an ambitious American household of 1913 thought a June dinner should look like.