FoodNet

The spirit of cookery

1895

Page 276

Presented as published in 1895. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
' The Bound of Beef is mostly salted and boiled, latterly, \ with the aid of the improved cooking-ranges, not rarely ! braised, a form in which we prefer it to the boiled. The braising should be begun with standard broth, and be effected in a well-heated oven in a closed braising-pan. If no such pan be at hand, cover the joint with a coat of dough. The Sportsman s Bound, or Boeuf de Chasse, is the ancient title of the largest joint that graces the table of hunting- parties. The name has been limited to the narrow title of 438 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY ‘ Hunting Beef,’ and, worse still, to the inappropriate sur- name of d la Chasseur. The recipes for its preparation from the beginning of last century, which we have compared, surpass in care and completeness all others of which we have cognisance. This comparison has convinced us even more forcibly than many others, that culinary literature has been, so to say, ‘ cockneyfied ’ in a lamentable manner, and has thereby lost much of the freshness and the grandeur of country customs. A preparation of the Flanks of Beef is called Collared Beef. In cookery-books, which are now approaching their centenary, we find many meat and fish preparations designated as collared. Many of these in newer works are termed ‘ rolled,’ from which the equivalence of collared and rolled may be inferred. But a number of dishes were anciently or are still called collared, there being in the manipulation to which they are subjected no item which could explain the adjec- tive. In these cases we suppose the adjective to have been acquired by the similarity of the collateral treatment pre- ceding or following the rolling. Amongst the collared dishes of distinction are : Collared Eel, Collared Sucking- pig, Calf’s-head collccrcd in imitation of Brawn, Collared Pig’s-head, and a dish termed S7nall Collars, made of the feet and ears of large pigs, representing a kind of brawn. What is now mostly called a Boll of Beef, or Collared Beef, is made more often of the flank. When it is not rolled, but kept flat, it is called Pressed Beef. The Bump of Beef a la Dauhe is important, as it exhibits the different meanings of two very similar words, the French substantive daube, a stew, and the English verb to daub, meaning to kml (probably in a peculiar rough way differing from the finer larding). Example, Gigot d la Daube = leg of mutton stewed. The French verb dauber has no culinary application. In some books, to dauhe (with the final e) is used as equivalent to larding, or, as an author has it, intci- PREPARATIONS OF BEEF 439