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Braised Beef
(English Recipe.) Lard 4 pounds of beef, from the rump; season it with salt, pepper, allspice, and chopped onion. Tie it neatly, and fry it in 2 ounces of butter or soup fat ( the skimming of stock.), then pour off the grease and add 1 pint of consomme, 1 cup tomatoes, a spoonful of sherry, 2 onions, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, sliced, and some parsley. Cook, covered, for 3 hours. Take out the meat, press the broth through a sieve, thicken it with flour, and pour around the meat. BEEF STEW (as cooked in Poland.) Bone and stuff a loin of beef or about 5 pounds with a good forcemeat; tie it firmly and brown it on one side in a little suet. Add 1 quart of stock or boiling water, and cook it for 3 hours, covered, with, if hot water is used, some onions, carrots, celery, and herbs. Strain the stock, reduce it by rapid boiling, add 1 cup of cooked and strained tomatoes and have ready a red cabbage, cooked and sliced and dipped in vinegar, one dozen small onions and 6 beets, cooked and sliced; arrange these nicely around the meat and pour the sauce over. Serve hot.
BOILED BEEF (as cooked in Hungary.) Chop the beef used in stock very fine, and arrange in shape of a mound. Garnish with shredded lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, gherkins, and capers; prepare a dressing of oil, vinegar (tarragon preferred.), onion juice, salt, and pepper; pour over all and serve cold.
Three braises in one entry, sharing a method: a large piece of beef browned, then cooked covered for three hours in stock with root vegetables. The instructions assume a stockpot household where consommé and skimmed soup fat are always to hand.
- Lard the beef, or don'tLarding means threading strips of pork fat through the lean with a larding needle. Rump is lean enough that the fat genuinely helps over three hours; if you skip it, use a chuck or brisket cut instead, or bard the rump by tying a sheet of fatback or bacon over the top.
- Heat level"Cook, covered, for 3 hours" implies a slow simmer rather than a boil. The recipe is written for the stove and gives no temperature at all; if you move it to a low oven, any figure you pick is a modern equivalent and not something the book specifies. A hard boil over that span will squeeze the meat dry and stringy no matter how well larded.
- Consommé and soup fatOne pint of consommé is 2 cups of strong, clear beef stock — low-sodium commercial stock reduced by a third comes close. "The skimming of stock" is the fat lifted off chilled stock; ordinary beef dripping, clarified butter or a neutral oil does the same job.
- Forcemeat for the Polish versionNo formula is given. A workable one is a pound of ground pork or veal with a cup of soaked breadcrumbs, an egg, chopped onion softened in butter, parsley, salt and pepper. Boning a loin and stuffing it is butcher's work — ask for it pocketed, or use a boned, rolled roast.
- "Brown it on one side"Brown it on all sides; one face of a five-pound roast will not carry enough colour. The seasoning otherwise comes from the forcemeat and, if water is used instead of stock, from the onions, carrots, celery and herbs the recipe adds.
- Thickening the English sauceFlour stirred straight into hot broth lumps. Cook equal weights of butter and flour together for a minute, whisk the strained broth into it, then simmer a few minutes to lose the raw taste. About 2 tablespoons of each per pint of liquid gives a light gravy.
- The Hungarian dish is a leftovers saladIt uses the boiled beef left after making stock — meat that has already surrendered its flavour, revived with an acid dressing. Chop rather than shred, dress it while still slightly warm so it absorbs the vinaigrette, then chill. Do not attempt it with fresh beef; it would be a waste of the cut.
- YieldFour pounds of rump serves 8 to 10; the five-pound stuffed loin, with cabbage, beets and onions around it, will feed a dozen. Both improve on the second day, sliced and reheated in their sauce.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that presented foreign dishes as souvenirs of travel, each labelled by nationality — hence three braised beefs, one English, one Polish, one Hungarian, printed nose to tail as though they were postcards from a tour. The nationalities are loose: braised rump with root vegetables and a strained, floured sauce is standard French technique as taught in English kitchens, and the "Polish" version's red cabbage in vinegar and sliced beets around the platter is doing most of the ethnographic work. The Hungarian entry is the honest one — cold boiled beef with capers, gherkins and a tarragon vinaigrette is the answer to what a household does with the meat once the soup has taken everything worth having from it. That thrift is the through-line here: the English recipe fries its beef in stockpot skimmings, and the third dish begins with beef left over from making stock.