Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon 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 in the aromas of the 18th century.
When I'm looking for dishes recipes to cook I want something that everyone can relate to and 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 au Ragout 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 ragout
enriched by adding mushrooms fresh or pickled artichoke bottoms boiled and quartered and the
hard yolks of eggs" now if we read through this it 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 we
could show she makes this uh 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
uh 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 uh 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 us 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 uh celery brings a certain kind of flavor with it and
definitely a certain amount of texture with it which is really the importance.
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 uh 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 gonna chop off the very top part of this artichoke we don't want any of this
we can see this is it's like a giant thistle head this is the the inner part of our thistle the
purple part we don't want any of that it's like hairy we don't want that and we're also going to
cut off the base of this stem we 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 so let's get rid of the first
there we go so 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
and 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 and 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 so our artichoke doesn't look beautiful and white right now we've used a
carbon steel knife and that causes a problem with something like an artichoke here it oxidizes gives
us that dark gray look 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'm 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 um 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 pretty 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'll 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 got a little bit of
sage we got some thyme in here some parsley this again will add a bunch of flavor and
we're just gonna 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 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 do with egg yolks which again is an interesting little addition to a stew that I would
never put in uh we've got some boiled eggs here and I'm just gonna very carefully
find that egg yolk there it is and pop that 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.
So this is gonna 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
the broth the liquid part here
and boy there's a very complex flavors they're they're all there layered it together
it's not like there's very many standouts there um but they're definitely um it's it's 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
there'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.