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Braised Beef Jardiniere
Three pounds of round of beef, try out about one-eighth of a pound of salt pork cut into dice; remove the scraps and put the beef into the hot pork fat; sear on both sides quickly; put the beef into a kettle and add one-half can of fresh tomatoes sweetened with a dessertspoonful of sugar, and salted to taste; two onions cut fine, one carrot cut fine, one small white turnip cut very fine, three cloves, a little stick of cinnamon broken fine and black pepper; stew slowly for six hours; the gravy will be dark and rich.
A plain pot roast of round with a sweet-spiced tomato braising liquid. The one thing to fix is the time: six hours of stewing will reduce lean round to dry shreds.
- Cut and timeRound is leaner than the cuts that reward very long stewing, so six hours risks drying it. Keep it tightly covered at a bare simmer on the stove, as the recipe directs, and start testing at about 2 1/2 hours; by 3 to 3 1/2 hours it will likely be as tender as it is going to get before turning fibrous. A chuck roast of the same weight takes the long haul better if you want the older texture.
- "Try out"Render the diced salt pork slowly over moderate heat until the fat runs and the dice are golden, then lift them out. Those are the "scraps" -- keep them and scatter over the finished dish rather than discarding.
- Half a can of tomatoesGenuinely ambiguous: period canned tomatoes came in roughly quart and pint tins as well as smaller sizes, and the text's "can of fresh tomatoes" most likely means a tin of tomatoes rather than raw fruit. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of canned tomatoes with their juice gives the right balance for a 3 lb roast.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. It probably serves to soften the acidity of period canned tomatoes; with modern canned tomatoes start with one teaspoon and taste at the end.
- SpicingThree whole cloves and a piece of cinnamon stick about an inch long is the sensible reading. Broken cinnamon is hard to fish out of the finished gravy -- tie the spices in a scrap of cheesecloth.
- Liquid levelNo water is called for, so the tomatoes and the vegetables have to supply everything. Use a heavy pot with a close-fitting lid, keep the heat low enough that the surface only shivers, and add a few spoonfuls of stock or water if the bottom threatens to catch.
- The jardiniere partThe carrot, onion and turnip here are cut fine and cook down into the sauce; they are seasoning, not garnish. For the classic look, cook a separate handful of carrots, turnips and green peas cut in neat shapes and arrange them around the sliced meat at the table.
- Finishing and yieldRest the meat, then strain or skim the pot liquor and reduce it briefly if it is thin. Three pounds of round serves six generously, with slices thin and across the grain.
A la jardiniere -- "gardener's style" -- is French restaurant shorthand for a dish surrounded by fresh vegetables cut into neat batons and dice, and by the end of the nineteenth century American cookbooks had borrowed the term freely, often for braises where the vegetables simply melted into the gravy. The salt pork here does familiar double duty: rendered dice gave both the searing fat and a bit of cured savour. The canned tomatoes are the other tell. Commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and ubiquitous in the United States by the 1890s, and the spoonful of sugar prescribed here answers a well-known complaint of the era, that tinned tomatoes carried a sharp, tinny acidity. Cloves and cinnamon in a beef braise look startling now, but sweet spice in savoury meat dishes was still common in American home cooking, a survival of much older English practice.