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Bachelor's Stew
(England.) This is still another old recipe, a relic of the days before clubs became plentiful and lonely men cooked their meals on the hob of the little fire-place of their own rooms.
Buy a slice of the fillet of veal, 2 inches thick, weighing 2 1/2 pounds. Fry it in a pan with some butter, a slice of lean ham, 2 carrots, 3 onions, sliced, and some celery and green peas, 1/2 cupful each, or more if desired. Add a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce and a cup of boiling water. Cover very closely, and let it simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Thicken the gravy with flour and pour it around the meat and vegetables, neatly arranged. TRIPE (a la mode de Caen.) Tripe is cooked in various styles at Caen, Dijon, Venice, Lyons, and Toulouse. That of Caen is justly the most delightful.
Clean, scald, and scrape 1 1/2 pounds of tripe-or it can be bought already dressed. Cut it into neat pieces about 2 inches square, and put it in an earthen casserole with 1 large carrot, and an onion, sliced, 1 clove, 1 bayleaf, a bit of thyme, and a spoonful of chopped parsley. Fry these in butter; add a pint of consomme and a tablespoonful of white wine or cider; cover closely and cook until tender. It must be served in the casserole, as it is abroad.
TRIPE (as cooked in Lyons.) Cut into narrow strips 1 pound of cold boiled tripe. Fry it in 2 ounces of butter or soup fat, clarified, with 2 large sliced onions, parsley, pepper, salt, and a tablespoonful of vinegar. When brown, pour into a dish, and serve with a border of Lyonnaise potatoes. The recipe for these can be found in any cook-book.
CALLALOU. (A greek dish, brought by sailors to Marseilles.) Cut into slices two dozen ochra pods, add a little salt, and set aside for 15 minutes. Then wash them with warm water, drain, and boil until tender. Drain them once more; add two handfuls of string beans, sliced and cooked. Cut also 2 egg plants into squares, 5 large tomatoes, and slice 2 large onions, and core and slice 2 green peppers. Cook all of these in butter or dripping, stirring until almost dry; season, add some chopped parsley, cook 10 minutes more, and serve hot.
Four separate dishes are run together on this page: an English braised veal, two French tripe preparations, and a vegetable stew filed under a Caribbean name. Each needs a little translation, and the tripe timings need the most.
- "Fillet of veal"In British butchery this is the leg, not the tenderloin — a thick round steak cut across the top of the leg. A 2 1/2 lb slice two inches thick is closer to a small roast than a steak; ask for a veal round or rump roast, or substitute the same weight of boneless veal shoulder, which braises better anyway.
- The hinge: keep it barely simmeringA single cup of boiling water under a tight lid is all the liquid the veal gets. It works only if the pot never boils and the seal is genuinely close — a heavy lidded Dutch oven, lowest burner, or 325F in the oven. Check once at 45 minutes and add a splash of water if the pan is dry.
- Thickening the gravyThere is no roux here. Lift out the meat and vegetables, then whisk in a beurre manié (1 tbsp soft butter kneaded with 1 tbsp flour) and simmer two minutes; dry flour stirred straight into hot liquid will lump.
- ServesThe stew feeds four generously. The Caen tripe serves three, the Lyons tripe two to three, the callalou four as a side.
- "Earthen casserole"Here the casserole is the vessel, not the dish -- a lidded earthenware pot brought whole to the table. A small enamelled cast-iron cocotte does the same job and can also go from oven to table.
- "Cook until tender" means hoursTripe is the vaguest instruction on the page. Even honeycomb tripe sold cleaned and part-cooked wants 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering; genuine tripe à la mode de Caen is traditionally sealed under a pastry lid and cooked overnight. Judge by texture, not the clock, and do not rush it — undercooked tripe is rubbery and will not improve on the plate.
- Tripe as sold todayAlmost all supermarket tripe is already scalded, bleached and blanched, so the "clean, scald, and scrape" step is done for you. Rinse well and, if it smells strongly, blanch ten minutes in fresh water and drain before starting.
- ConsomméConsomme -- Substitute a good unsalted veal or beef stock. Commercial canned consomme is much saltier than the period article; if you use it, hold back the salt until the end.
- OchraOkra. The salting-and-rinsing step draws off some of the mucilage; cooking the vegetables "until almost dry" over decent heat does the rest, so resist adding liquid.
- Lyonnaise potatoesThe author declines to give them: parboiled potatoes sliced and fried in butter with sliced onions until both are browned, finished with parsley.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of travel cookery, in which an American or English compiler gathers dishes country by country and hands them to home cooks as souvenirs. The headnote to the stew is doing social history as much as cooking: before London's clubland spread and cheap chop-houses multiplied, a single man in lodgings cooked over the hob of his own grate, which is exactly why this recipe is one pot, one lid, and an hour and a half of neglect. The tripe entries reflect the period's confidence that provincial French cookery was worth naming by town \Caen is generally traced to Normandy monastic and butchers' cookery and is properly built on cider, calvados and a calf's foot; this compressed version allows only a tablespoonful of white wine or cider, and drops the calvados and the calf's foot. The callalou is the odd one out and the attribution is simply wrong: callaloo is a Caribbean dish named for the leafy greens (amaranth or taro leaf) it is built on, with clear West African roots, and has no Greek origin. What the author has actually recorded is a Mediterranean summer vegetable stew of okra, aubergine, tomato and pepper \the same family as ratatouille and Balkan güveç \collected from sailors and given the wrong passport.