Beef à-la-Mode

History

Beef à la mode is a French dish — in its modern form 'a piece of beef braised in stock and wine with carrots and onions'. The name comes from La Varenne's Le Cuisinier françois (1651); its 1653 London translation, The French Cook, was the first French cookbook translated into English and introduced culinary terms including 'à la mode'. In La Varenne's 1651 version the dish 'was a spiced beef rather than the later 1700s version,' and by the first part of the 1700s 'boeuf à la mode' had become beef marinated in red wine then braised with onion and carrot. Mary Randolph recorded an American version in The Virginia House-Wife (1824; the surviving Project Gutenberg text is an 1860 printing): a boned round of beef filled with a forcemeat of stale breadcrumbs, four ounces of marrow, two heads of garlic chopped with thyme and parsley, nutmeg, cloves, pepper and salt bound with four beaten egg yolks; bound in a linen fillet, baked three hours in a covered vessel with a pint of red wine, the gravy thickened with brown flour and finished with mushroom and walnut catsup, garnished with fried forcemeat balls, and 'still better when eaten cold with sallad'. The sources do not document any social-status, wealth, or class meaning for this dish; those claims are omitted.

Ingredients

• 1 round of beef
• stale loaf
• 4 ounces marrow
• 2 garlic heads
• thyme
• parsley
• nutmeg
• cloves
• pepper
• salt
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 pint red wine
• brown flour
• mushroom catsup
• walnut catsup

Instructions

1. Remove the bone from a round of beef. Make a forcemeat by combining breadcrumbs from a stale loaf, four ounces of marrow, two chopped garlic heads, thyme, parsley, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and salt. Mix this to a paste with the beaten yolks of four eggs.
2. Stuff the lean part of the round with this forcemeat mixture. Form the remainder of the forcemeat into balls. Sew a fillet of strong linen around the beef, wide enough to keep it round and compact.
3. Place the beef in a vessel just large enough to hold it. Add one pint of red wine. Cover with sheets of tin or iron and set in a properly heated brick oven. Bake for three hours.
4. When done, skim the fat from the gravy and thicken it with brown flour. Add some mushroom and walnut catsup to the gravy. Fry the forcemeat balls and serve them as garnish with the beef. The dish is also excellent served cold with salad.