French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [199]
The time taken for the beef to cook depends very much upon the cut and quality of the meat; but should it appear to be cooked in too short a time, that is to say in less than 3 hours, it probably means it has been cooked at too high a heat or that your piece of meat is rather small. What you do then is to remove the meat and let the rest of the ingredients go on cooking slowly, to make sure that the gelatine from the calf’s feet is thoroughly extracted, otherwise the sauce will not set to a good jelly.
The final operations are the tricky ones. The usual instructions are that, having untied the string from your meat, you arrange the rest of the carrots, separately boiled, all round it, and pour over the hot strained stock, leaving it to set and taking off the fat when it has done so. The dish is then ready to serve.
A more satisfactory method from the point of view of final results is to pour your strained stock into a separate bowl and leave it overnight to set. You then clear it completely of the fat. This process is explained on page 73. The meat itself can be sliced for serving (although this is only to be recommended to those who have a sure hand in operations of this kind), reconstituted into its original shape and placed in the serving dish, which should be a deep and capacious one, with the carrots all round. The jelly, heated until it is just melted, should be poured over the meat when it is quite cold but before it starts to re-set. If you pour it warm over the meat, more fat will be released, and when the jelly is set the surface will be once more studded with little particles of fat. This does not really matter, but detracts slightly from the beautiful limpid appearance of the finished dish; it can be remedied, however, to a certain extent by wringing out a cloth in hot water and with this carefully removing the little fat globules. ‘What are you doing?’ a guest once asked me as he saw me at this task. ‘Polishing the beef?’ Which I suppose is what it really amounts to.
All that is needed to go with the bœuf mode is a plain salad. Do not, I beg and beseech, subscribe to the English custom of serving hot vegetables with cold meat. In the first place their presence on the plate will melt the jelly and nullify the whole idea of the dish, and in the second place they are totally out of keeping. You already have meat, carrots and a wine-flavoured jelly; a dish in fact quite complete in itself; nothing else is needed.
The calf’s feet are sometimes cut up and minus their bones arranged round the beef with the carrots; sometimes they are coated with breadcrumbs and melted butter and grilled to make a little hot hors-d’œuvre for another meal, sometimes they are cooked again with fresh vegetables, herbs and seasonings plus perhaps some meat to make a second lot of jellied stock. And, incidentally, when calf’s feet are unobtainable, as they quite frequently are in this country, at any rate in London, pigs’ trotters will do instead, but remember that they are much smaller, so you will need three or four instead of two. Or two plus some strips of pork rind, which are also valuable for their gelatinous qualities.
Whether you use red wine or white is really a matter of taste or of what is available. Red wine makes a darker, more sumptuous-looking jelly; white produces a somewhat milder, lighter flavour.
QUEUE DE BŒUF AUX OLIVES NOIRES
STEWED OXTAIL WITH BLACK OLIVES
For 2 oxtails the other ingredients are olive oil, brandy, white wine, stock or water, a big bouquet of bayleaves, thyme, parsley, orange peel and crushed garlic cloves, about lb. of stoned black olives.
Have the oxtails cut into the usual pieces by the butcher. Put them to steep in cold water for a couple of hours so that the blood soaks out. Take them out and drain them. Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a big heavy stew-pan or daubière. Put in the pieces of oxtail and let them sizzle gently a few minutes. Pour over 4 to 6 tablespoons of warmed brandy and set light to it.