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Ragout of Roast Beef
Make a sauce of a tablespoonful of butter, three tablespoonfuls of red currant jelly and gill of gravy or white sauce, according to taste. Stir this sauce until it is thoroughly hot, thicken it slightly with browned flour, and then add underdone slices of cold roast beef, all cut into even shapes. Heat all through, on no account allowing it to boil, and serve very hot. Set a mold of boiled and seasoned spinach in a dish, arrange the pieces of beef around it; boil the gravy a little to glaze it and mark the meat in it.
A made dish for leftover roast, built on the sweet-sharp currant jelly sauce that Victorian cooks used with beef, venison and mutton alike. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the sauce is together.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge. Cold roast beef that has already been cooked once will seize, curl and go grey and stringy the moment the sauce simmers. Hold the pan below a shiver, just hot enough to warm the slices through, two or three minutes at most.
- A gill4 fl oz, half a cup in American measure (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz). With a tablespoon of butter and three of jelly, that gives roughly three-quarters of a cup of sauce.
- Browned flourPlain flour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until it is the colour of dark sand. It was kept in a jar as a standing pantry item for colouring gravies. It thickens less than raw flour, so use a little more than you would expect, or substitute a teaspoon of arrowroot slaked in cold water.
- Underdone slicesThe recipe assumes beef carved rare to medium-rare from a joint, sliced thin and trimmed into even pieces so they sit neatly around the spinach. Well-done leftovers will not improve in the pan.
- Red currant jellyThe clear, tart jelly still sold for game and lamb, not the sweet spreading jam. If yours is on the sweet side, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar or a squeeze of lemon brings the balance back.
- Gravy or white sauceGravy means the strained pan juices or a light beef stock. White sauce of this period could be either milk-thickened or made on a light stock; the milk version gives a paler, milder result.
- The spinach moldBoiled spinach, drained hard, chopped and seasoned, then pressed into a small basin or cup and turned out in the centre of the platter. Squeeze it genuinely dry or it will weep water into the sauce.
- GlazingOnce the meat is arranged, the remaining sauce is boiled briefly to thicken it and brushed over the slices. Do this off the meat so the beef is not sitting over heat.
- YieldAbout four servings, depending entirely on how much roast you have left. The dish is meant to be composed on one platter and carried to the table hot.
Ragout, from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, had in English kitchens come to mean almost any dish of meat reheated in a sauce, and books of this period lean on it heavily as a way of using the second and third days of a large joint. The pairing of beef with red currant jelly belongs to the older English habit of serving tart jellies and sauces with roast and game meat, a taste that survives in the mint sauce and cranberry of modern tables. What dates the recipe most clearly is the presentation: a molded dome of vegetable in the centre with the meat arranged around it and the sauce reduced and brushed on as a glaze.