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By Root 2160 0

things as shoulder and breast of lamb, shoulder cuts, skirt and briskets of beef, shins of veal and belly of pork are so neatly prepared that when the housewife buys them she knows exactly what she is getting; there will be no trimming or boning for her to do at home and so no waste, of either time or materials. Beef for braising or for bœuf mode, bœuf bourguignon or the pot-au-feu will be on display at the butcher’s without her having to order it specially, to have it larded or to explain what is to be done. And this is where we come up against a difficulty when we want to cook French meat dishes in England, for it is not only the meticulous cutting and seaming, trimming and larding and tying which is differently approached in France, but the separation of the carcases into their various cuts is done on a different system, particularly in regard to beef and veal, so that it is not easy to get, in England, the precise equivalent of a French shoulder cut of beef for a pot-au-feu, of a leg cut for a daube, of a noix of veal for roasting, or escalopes for frying. In the meat recipes, therefore, I have tried wherever possible to indicate English equivalents or alternatives to the French cuts.

This, perhaps, is the place to add that although I have included a good many recipes for the cheaper cuts of meat, since I believe that these are the kind of dishes most needed by English housewives today, I have kept recipes for liver, kidneys, sweetbreads and brains down to a minimum. Once cheap delicacies, these things are now almost in the luxury category and, at least as far as sweetbreads and brains are concerned, the fact that they are also tedious to prepare seems to put them rather out of the good value class.

LE BŒUF

BEEF

One of the worst stumbling blocks to the buying of meat in England is the insistence upon cuts which can be quickly prepared and cooked. Butchers are inundated with demands for roasting and grilling cuts, of which, after all, there is only a limited quantity in each animal.

To satisfy customers, butchers bone, trim and tie up secondary cuts of meat in a more or less rough and ready manner and sell them at a small amount less than, say, sirloin or prime ribs. The inexperienced housewife puts them in a hot oven to roast and hopes for the best. Ten to one the joint will emerge tough, dry (dryness is the main defect to combat in the cooking of second-class cuts) and impossible to carve. This is partly because the joint is too small for the kind of baking which we call roasting and partly because the meat has been too hastily cut and dressed.

A skilful, experienced butcher treats his meat almost as a tailor does his cloth. If it is stretched out of shape, if there are seams in the wrong places, if he has to make up a respectable-looking joint by adding a piece here, skewering in some fat there, he knows that as soon as the meat is exposed to violent heat it will contract; unnaturally stretched muscles will spring back into place; it will cook unevenly; it will end up looking like a parcel damaged in the Christmas mails. No wonder people say that the cheaper cuts are a false economy. But if that same piece of meat had been stripped of membrane, sinew and gristle before it was rolled and tied, it would be a compact little joint which would keep its shape during cooking and which could be quite successfully roasted.

This is the French method even with what might be termed first-class secondary joints such as topside and the equivalent of our aitchbone, which are used for such delicious dishes as bœuf mode and bœuf bourguignon. But only in rare instances are these methods practised in England. Even so, the English cook can still make the best of the secondary English joints, such as rolled top rib or a piece of top rump, by cooking them gently, with a little extra liquid to moisten them, and with aromatic vegetables and seasonings to help the flavour, in a closely-covered pot so that all possible moisture is retained; and if they are not so elegant in appearance as the French cuts they will still emerge