A Breakfast Stew (very nice).
Two pounds of lean beef. (The “second best cuts” may be used here.)
A quarter of a medium-sized onion.
A tablespoonful of browned flour.
Half a teaspoonful each of minced parsley, summer savory, and sweet marjoram.
As much allspice as will lie on a silver dime.
One teaspoonful of Halford sauce.
One saltspoonful of made mustard.
One saltspoonful of pepper.
Strained juice of half a lemon.
Cut the meat into pieces an inch square. Put it with the chopped onion into a saucepan with a pint of lukewarm water; cover closely and cook slowly, at least two hours and a half. The meat should not be allowed to boil hard at any time, and when done, be so tender that it is ready to fall to pieces.
Pour the stew into a bowl, add the salt and pepper, cover it and set in a cool place until next morning.
Then put it back into the sauce-pan, set it over a quick fire, and when it begins to boil, stir in the spice and herbs. (The latter may be bought dried and powdered at the druggist’s if you cannot get them fresh.)
Boil up sharply five minutes.
The flour should be browned the day before, by spreading it on a tin plate and setting this on the stove, stirring constantly to keep it from burning black. Or a better way is, to set the tin plate in a hot oven, opening the door now and then to stir it. It is a good plan to brown a good deal—say a cupful of flour—at a time, and keep it in a glass jar for thickening gravies, etc.
Wet up a heaping tablespoonful of this with three tablespoonfuls of cold water, the lemon-juice, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Rub smooth and stir well into the stew. Boil two minutes longer to thicken the gravy and turn out into a deep covered dish.
This is a good dinner, as well as breakfast dish. A teaspoonful of catsup is an improvement.
8
WHAT TO DO WITH “LEFT-OVERS.”
A VOLUME, instead of a single chapter, might be written upon the various methods of preparing what the French call “rechauffés,” and we speak of, usually contemptuously, as “warmed-over” meats. Cold meat is seldom tempting except to the very hungry. Cold tongue, ham and poultry are well enough on picnics and as a side-dish at tea. At breakfast they are barely admissible; for a simple luncheon tolerable; for dinner hardly excusable. At the first and last meal of the day, the stomach craves something hot and relishable.
A wife told me, once, with strong disgust in the remembrance, that when her husband took her on the wedding-trip to visit his mother, a frugal Massachusetts matron, they were set down within half an hour after their arrival, to lunch on a cold eel-pie left from the day before. The daughter-in-law, forty years later, spoke feelingly of the impression of niggardliness and inhospitality made on her mind by the incident.
“If she had even warmed it up, I should not have felt so forlornly homesick,” she said. “But cold eel-pie! Think of it!”
I confess to heartfelt sympathy with the complainant. There is a suggestion of friendliness and home-comfort in the “goodly smell” of a steaming-hot entrée set before family or guest. It argues forethought for those who are to be fed. We have the consciousness that we are expected and that somebody has cared enough for us to make ready a visible welcome. Pale slices of cold mutton, and thin slabs of corned beef cannot, with the best intentions on the part of the caterer, convey this.
The summing up of this lecture, is: Neither despise unlikely fragments left over from roast, baked or boiled, nor consider them good enough as they are without “rehabilitation.”
We will begin with a dish the mention of which provokes a sneer more often than any other known to civilization.