"Beef The Vinegar"

we cook this beef we let it get cold and then we serve it out this recipe is called beef le vinegre or the vinegar beef i can't wait to try this out thanks for joining us today on 18th century cooking [Music] this recipe today comes out of the new and easy method of cookery by elizabeth cleland 1755 so it's kind of early and this has a lot of scottish influence in this particular cookbook and it's interesting that she pulled this recipe out and again this one is strange in the fact that it's kind of served cold it's a a cold collation dish that has a lot of wine in it it's even that that vinegar kind of flavor here shows up so it's definitely different than something that i'm normally used to i'm not used to a bitter uh kind of flavor in a meat anyway but it's going to be doing some very very interesting things let me read to you this recipe it's beef vinaigrette get a slice of beef three inches thick most lean from the buttock stew it with a little water and a jill of white wine season it with salt and pepper cloves and a bundle of sweet herbs and a bay leaf let it boil till it is very tender then set it a cooling and when cold serve it up with a slice of lemon and a little vinegar okay so this one is tough to interpret we can't just grab this recipe and do it we actually have to think about what's going on here and put it together get a slice slice of beef three inches thick most lean no problem stew it with a little water and a jill of wine stop and then it says season it with pepper salt cloves herbs uh bay leaf stop then it says let it boil till it is very tender then set it a cooling and when it's cold serve it up the problem here is is she talks about stewing it and then she talks about boiling it now is that two different operations do we stew it and then we boil it or is this actually one operation we stew it boiling it right and i think that's what's actually going on she doesn't say stew it then take it out and put it in boiling water she says stew stewart boiling it this long so i this one can be tough and you could do it several different ways i think though the right way is to have this you make up you know how you have it cooking in the pan and you just let it boil stew until it's very tender so we're going to stew this up in a deep pan i've got a deep fry pan here we could use a dutch oven that would work great in this situation we're going to put some hot water in there and get that going we need maybe a half a cup of water going on in this pan we're going to put our meat in once it's up to temperature add a little bit or our jill of wine which is a quarter cup of wine put a little bit on on top and put it into our stewing liquid we're gonna let this cook a little bit before we do anything else uh once i flip this over then we'll start to put in the spices so let's talk about what's really going on with the wine here it's a very very important part of cooking this it isn't i mean we could use just water but it's not going to work as well that wine is going to help break down this very tough beef and beef can be tough in the time period especially she called for lean beef so we want this this wine the acid of the wine to help tenderize the meat while it's cooking it's going to make it so much better once our beef has been stewing for a few minutes now we can go to the spicing now this talks about salt pepper cloves well we have something that's perfect for this that's the kitchen pepper that we sell the townsend's kitchen pepper wonderful for this dish it has the salt the pepper and it has the cloves which is kind of important also has a few things like nutmeg a great mix does it all in one so kitchen pepper is great you can check out our kitchen pepper on our website townsend.us also we've got these sweet herbs that go in and we're just going to put a little bundle of those we can take them out later and a bay leaf now that we've got the spices in we're going to let this cook down as we turn it over you can put a little spice right on top of the meat and then flip it back over and we want to add a little bit more water to it because again it needs to boil as it were so simmer we need to have a make sure we have enough hot water in there to boil and if you can put it put a cover on this and kind of hold those uh hold that heat in and hold the flavors in at the same time so we're going to put a pie pan over the top of our skillet there's nothing left to do but wait on this until it's done nice and tender do do we sliced this up nice and thin and it's cold it's meant to be served cold we've got our lemon slices we've already poured our uh vinegar over the top i'm going to add just a just a touch of salt and we can give one of these little pieces of tray let me add a little bit add a little bit of lemon here there we go let's find out just how this one turned out a giant piece [Music] you wanna how was it it's really really good um you definitely want to cut this in smaller pieces uh this um is is nice and tender very especially when it's cut nice and thin like this and it would be just um you know you can see this on a served with a bunch of other dishes so that i mean obviously this isn't the main course so a wonderful way to serve this beef and while this is cooking you're cooking other things at the same time aren't you so it is that that kind of a dish that you would set on the table with four or five other things the spices come right out in this we definitely get some of those you think they might get lost in that boiling but no they're here uh and the vinegar the lemon come through and change this dish so this isn't you know just a raw roast beef uh that you would you know cook over the fire like we've done in the past but that vinegar is giving you a nice little kick uh that is definitely a little different than just your typical roast beef every one of these recipes is a word problem so just like in school when you have these math problems and you know it's like what's going on with these you have to figure out the formula for the recipe and understand what's what they actually mean by each one of these words we can misinterpret them in our 200 years later uh vocabulary and so we do have to dig in on these to understand exactly what the original uh cook was was really trying to get at this dish will pair perfectly with another recipe we've done check this out

Channel: Townsends

Views: 168,203

Rating: 4.9817724 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: szB5Ibyp1Xg

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021