Serves 6–8
5–6 tablespoons olive oil or dripping
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 onions, finely chopped
2 celery sticks, finely chopped
2kg/4½lb braising beef, cut into 4cm/1½ inch chunks
1 bay leaf
a pinch of dried thyme
2 parings of orange peel
600mt/1 pint real ale
2 tablespoons plain flour
beef or other meat stock, to cover
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Heat about a third of the fat in a large, deep pan and gently cook the garlic, onions and celery in it until soft. Remove the vegetables with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add more of the fat to the pan, turn up the heat and brown the beef on all sides, cooking it in batches and setting it aside as soon as it is done. Add more fat as necessary. Add the herbs, orange peel and ale to the pan and bring to the boil, scraping away at the base of the pan with a wooden spoon to deglaze it. Return the meat and vegetables to the pan, sprinkle with the flour and stir well. Add enough stock to cover, then stir and bring to the boil, skimming off any foam that rises to the top. Turn down the heat to a slow bubble and cook, covered, for 1½–2 hours, until the meat is tender. Skim off any fat. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Cold Salt Beef and Green Sauce
If you are lucky enough to know a butcher who puts brisket and silverside in a brine cure, it is an easy and quite economical dish to cook for one meal. Hopefully, there will be leftovers for following days, to eat in sandwiches with mustard or as a salad with a herb sauce.
Serves 6–8
1.5-2kg/3¼4½lb piece of boned. rolled salt-cured silverside or brisket
1 clove
1 star anise
1 bay leaf
For the green sauce:
5 sprigs of parsley, chopped (or chervil, if you can find it)
3 sprigs of tarragon, chopped
4 sprigs of basil, chopped
about 2 tablespoons chopped chives
1 tablespoon chopped cornichons (baby gherkins)
1 heaped teaspoon capers, rinsed and chopped
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
6 tablespoons olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Soak the beef in cold water for a few hours or overnight, changing the water once or twice. Drain the beef and put it in a large pan with enough water to cover. Add the clove, star anise and bay leaf, bring to the boil, then turn the heat down so the water is barely boiling – ‘murmuring’ is a good description. Simmer for 2–3 hours, until the meat is tender when pierced with a knife. Lift out, wrap in foil and leave to rest for a good hour.
To make the sauce, mix all the ingredients together, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.
Serve slices of the lukewarm beef with the sauce and a potato salad. You could make the bacon and potato salad, omitting the bacon.
Beef – the valuable cuts
Now and again I turn to the special parts of beef for food to feast on – the sirloins, fillets, rump steaks and forerib. All can be cooked quickly, can be eaten rare and never toughen. Eating a grilled steak is an easy task – sometimes too easy with fillet steak, which can be tender to the point of dullness and lacks the flavour of a good rump steak.
These cuts form a small percentage of the meat on a beef animal, and have prices that match their economy of scale. Economic to buy they are not. It is not unusual to see well-trimmed fillet sold at over £35 per kilo. That’s more than £8 per helping, so it is a meal that I will not serve for supper any old day.
What matters is to recognise that these are not cuts that should be eaten every day, even if your means make them affordable. A farmer goes to immense trouble over the years to rear a steer to perfection, yet there is only enough fillet to feed about 20 people from it. A butcher must trim off a good proportion of the fillet once it has been extracted from the carcass, because it is unsaleable with the untidiness of stray pieces of beef and some membrane. This meat is chucked into the mince and sold for pence, not pounds. For every fillet in a beef side there’s an awful lot of much less valuable meat that is a hard job for the butcher to sell. It’s not really acceptable for someone who says they love beef to eat only the fillet or sirloin. Demand for fillet is a demand for a whole animal to be reared and slaughtered and there is – bossy as it sounds – a collective responsibility to find uses for the other cuts. I am not suggesting buying the whole cow, but you can buy beef boxes from some butchers and mail-order services. You can also ask for bones. They are free, and a source of good stock, marrow or even canine happiness. Butchers and meat producers pay to have bones and waste material removed and disposed of.
So, if I haven’t made you feel too guilty …
Roast Rare Aged Beef Sirloin with a Mustard and Watercress Sauce
Now that the Over-Thirty-Month rule has been lifted, it is possible once again to buy beef from steers that have reached their full maturity. So we now have four-year-old beef and it is unbelievably good, both to cook and in its vintage flavour. I buy four-year-old well-hung Galloway beef from Ben Weatherall, of Blackface (see Buying beef). Its texture and the way it cooks so beautifully, barely losing an ounce as it roasts, is confirmation that growing an animal slowly is the best approach to rearing beef.
When you buy your sirloin, ask the butcher for the ‘cradle’ of detached ribs for it to sit in as it roasts; they can be used to make stock for other dishes.
Serves 6
1.25kg/2¾lb whole piece of rolled sirloin
fennel seeds
6 small sprigs of thyme
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
For the mustard and watercress sauce:
leaves from 2 bunches of watercress
1 tablespoon English mustard powder
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
4 tablespoons chicken stock
1 shallot, roughly chopped
1 garlic clove, roughly chopped
200ml/7fl oz olive oil
lemon juice
Allow the beef to come to room temperature before you begin roasting. Preheat the oven to 240°C/475°F/Gas Mark 9.
Season the beef all over and put it in a roasting tin. Scatter the fennel seeds and thyme on top. Put in the oven and roast for 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 175°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and continue roasting for about 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and test for doneness. To do this, insert a skewer into the thickest part of the meat,