Beef Stew From 1775

Welcome to 18th Century Cooking. I'm your host John Townsend and today we're doing a beef stew, something you've had many times in the past, but this recipe has some interesting 18th century additions. Thanks for joining us as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century. When I'm looking for dishes, recipes to cook, I want something that everyone can relate to a recipe like this one, but I also want something that's very, very specifically 18th century. This recipe is from The Lady's Assistant by Charlotte Mason. And this recipe book is filled with very, very well-to-do dishes, expensive dishes, and low dishes as well. This one's no different. So let's find this recipe. It's not in the book under beef stew like we might think. This one has a fancy name. It's called Rump O' Ragu. Let's read it here. Cut the meat from the bone, flour it, fry it, pour over it a little boiling water, about a pint of small beer, add a carrot or two, an onion stuck with cloves, some whole peppers, salt, a piece of lemon peel, a bunch of sweet herbs. Let these stew an hour. Then add some good gravy. When the meat is tender, take it out, strain the sauce, thicken it with a little flour, add a little celery, ready boiled, a little ketchup, put in the meat, just simmer it up. Or the celery may be omitted and the ragu enriched by adding mushrooms, fresh or pickled, artichoke bottoms, boiled and quartered, and the hard yolks of eggs. Now, if we read through this, we see underneath it all, it's just a plain old beef stew. Now, we cut up the meat chunks, kind of small. You could cook this all in sort of one big piece of meat. Obviously, we don't want the bones. We cut that out of here. But she's added all these things to make it a meal that could go on a fairly well-to-do table. She makes this fancy here. She adds things like the mushrooms and fresh or pickled, the artichoke bottoms, which is a very interesting addition to this. And it'll definitely change the flavor and the look, and especially the hard yolks of eggs. Those are little garnishes that she's putting on top of something that is basically pretty plain. So it's great that we have basically a very, very simple recipe, something that we would recognize as beef stew, or she fancies it up a bit. Our first step on this recipe is our meat. We're going to take the meat and cut it into smaller size pieces. The recipe doesn't call for this specifically, but it's going to cook much easier like this and make a wonderful beef stew. So we're going to cut these pieces down and then season them. In this case, we only need to season with some salt. And then we're going to dredge these through some flour and get ready for browning them. So our piece of meat here is a wonderful round that is boneless. Our Dutch oven is all warmed up. We've got some butter already melted in the bottom of the pan. Let's toss in these pieces to brown. While our meat is simmering, let's work on the other components of this recipe. We've got some carrots here that we want for our stew, and we're going to just scrape these real quick to get the outside layer off of them. It doesn't take very long at all. There we go. Now, we're not using a giant Dutch oven here, so we only need a couple of these carrots. We're just going to cut some rounds for this, and I like my carrots to not get too... I like them to get a little softer, so we're going to cut them a little bit thinner so they have time to soften up in our stew. And we need an onion with cloves. And this is one of those tricks that you see all over 18th century cookbooks, and that has to do with how do you get cloves into this dish and flavor it without them staying in there when you actually want to strain it later on. You don't want these cloves to be there when you're eating the dish. You just want it to flavor it in the beginning part. So we have our onion and cloves, and we just stick our cloves into our onion here. Now remember, this is a high-end stew as it were, so we've even got lemon peel in here. It gives lots and lots of complex flavors. We just want that little outer bit of our lemon peel. We don't want to get any of that white pith in there. And I don't know that we need a ton here, but it'll be nice to get a good little bit of peel. We're going to build a very, very complex dish here, so we're going to keep adding ingredients. Celery is one of these. We, again, on this recipe, she says you could leave that out if you add some of these other ones. We're just going to add a bit of celery in here. We don't need a lot, but I want a little bit. Celery brings a certain kind of flavor with it and definitely a certain amount of texture with it, which is really the important. Now it's time to work on our artichoke. Artichokes can be intimidating, and they're a little tricky to get into. If you want an in-depth one, we've done an artichoke episode. You might want to check that out, but let's get this. I think on this one, so what we really want is the core section down here. We're going to chop off the very top part of this artichoke. We don't want any of this. We can see it's like a giant thistle head. This is the inner part of our thistle, the purple part. We don't want any of that. It's hairy. We don't want that. We're also going to cut off the base of this stem. You might want a little bit of the stem. There's still some good stuff in the very, very center of that, but we don't need very much of it. Let's get rid of the first. There we go. We just have about an inch of the stem here. We want to peel off all these outer leaves. There we go. We just want these tender inner leaves here and just the bottom parts. I'm going to take my knife and trim this way. Well, actually, let's cut this in half. This will make it a whole lot easier. Let's cut our thing right down the center from the center of the stem through the center of the piece. We can really see what's going on there. Check that out. There we go. We can see this sort of a cutaway view, and you can see this inner part that's all hairy. We don't want any of that at all. We're going to cut all that loose, and we're going to trim out the very outside edge too. Our artichoke doesn't look beautiful and white right now. We used a carbon steel knife, and that causes a problem with something like an artichoke here. It oxidizes, gives us that dark gray look. It doesn't look great. If this was used for a garnish in the top of the dish, I would have a bowl with lemon juice in it, and I'd drop these in, and it would keep it from doing that oxidation. In our case, that's not going to matter any, so I'm going to go ahead and not worry about that. I am now going to slice these up into smaller pieces, so it can go into our stew and cook down. And here we go. Our artichoke is ready just like that. We'll have a couple of artichokes, so we have enough for our stew. It's time to put our vegetables in. The meat is ready. Now it's time for vegetables. We've already got our celery and our carrots cut. I'm going to put in the artichokes now, and remember the artichokes in the recipe, those were sort of intended for, you know, a garnish later on. In our circumstance, we're not really concerned about that. This is kind of a one-pot dish, so the artichokes need to go in early because they're not going to be pre-boiled, so they're going in now. So let's put these artichokes in. I've got our lemon peel, and lemon peel just gets put in at this stage too. When I normally think of stews, it's a pretty simple dish. This one's very complicated. It has layers and layers of flavors here. So there are the artichokes. Let's go ahead and put in our peppercorns, so we're going to sprinkle some peppercorns in there. Let's put in our onion with cloves, and remember these cloves, they'll come out easy. Later on, we'll take this whole onion out. We're going to nestle that down in there so that it can cook in the flavor. We don't want that to set up on top. I've got some dried mushrooms instead of fresh. So that they can rehydrate, I'll put them in now. At this stage, we also put in our bundle of sweet herbs. We've got a little bit of sage, we've got some thyme in here, some parsley. This, again, will add a bunch of flavor, and we're just going to tuck this in, and it's in our bundle here so that we can take it out later. Now, our liquid ingredients. We've got small beer, a whole pint of small beer that we're going to pour in at this stage. In the case of the small beer, you can use any beer that you have available to you, and we're going to top this up with warm water or hot water, even boiling water, she calls it. Again, we want to get to the top of our ingredients here. Our stew is ready to simmer on the fire. I'm so excited to see what happens with the artichokes. I've never seen one in a stew or a dish like this, so I'm really excited about trying this out. This goes on the fire to simmer for one hour. While that's still simmering, we have a little bit of work to do. We've got to put in this final flavor and look to it, and that has to with egg yolks, which again is an interesting little addition to a stew that I would never put in. We've got some boiled eggs here, and I'm just going to very carefully find that egg yolk. There it is. I pop it right out. There we go. There's our egg yolk. These will go in right at the end. They're already pre-cooked, so they'll look good on the very top. This is going to really set it off. After our good gravy, a little bit of mushroom ketchup. You can find a link for that down in the description. Finally, it's done. It's ready to try out. The smells are just amazing, and you know what? I like my beef stew thick, and this turned out thick, so let's find out what happens with all these flavors. It's so complex for, you know, a beef stew, right? So here's the beef done to perfection. Cloves come out right up on top. So the question is, what's happening with all this, you know, the broth, the liquid part here? And boy, there's some very complex flavors there. They're all there layered together. It's not like there's very many standouts there, but they're definitely, it's very, very rich, and you can even get a little bit of that mushroom ketchup at the very end. So let's find out what really happens with the artichokes. That's the one I really wanted to know. It's artichoke, all right. So artichoke is not adding a whole lot of different flavor here, but we get a different texture. I don't know if it's wasted in this. Maybe as a garnish up on top where you could eat it a little bit separately would make a little bit more sense, but it's definitely something different to put in your stew. A little mushroom, a little egg yolk. I can see why they put the egg yolk in there, especially up on top. This is so good. If you're a reenactor, you do beef stews maybe at events, you know, it can get a little monotonous. You want to try what we've added here. Definitely brings in some different flavors. Spice it up. It's going to be really good. And if you'd like another episode that's like this one, five years ago, we did this great pot roast. Check this video out.