Vintage Recipe Thursday: Leftovers

Here's a menu from Modern Meal Maker (from 1935), to help use up leftovers from the roast beef from my last post.

Minced Beef Sandwich

Raw Vegetable Salad

Fresh Cherries

Coffee, Tea or Milk

My "raw vegetable" was lettuce, because that's what I had.  With only two people in our house, we often have to eat the same vegetable several meals in a row to use it up before it goes bad!  The original recipe uses cabbage, carrots and celery and I'll have to try it soon.  The vinaigrette is adapted from the one in Mastering the Art of French Cooking: 3 parts olive oil, 1 part white wine vinegar, salt and pepper, a bit of Dijon mustard and a sprinkling of fresh or dried herbs.  It's important to use good olive oil and good vinegar, which cost significantly more than their cheap counterparts, but the taste is worth it.

To make the Minced Beef Sandwich, just toast one thick slice of good white bread per person and top with beef in gravy:

Make the gravy by melting 2 teaspoons of leftover beef drippings with 1 teaspoon of butter over low heat in a saucepan.  Then, whisk in 1 tablespoon of all-purpose flour (plus a pinch of salt and pepper) and cook over low heat two minutes.  Take off the heat and gradually whisk in 1 1/2 cups beef stock and return to the heat.  Bring to a boil, boil one minute, add the chopped beef (1/4 to 1/3 lb) and turn heat down so mixture simmers 5 to 10 minutes to heat the beef and reduce the gravy.  Serves 2.

Sorry there's no photo.  I didn't get a good one!

Because I'm not the biggest fan of cherries and I had a punnet of past-it strawberries, I adapted two recipes* from BBC Good Food for Strawberry Jellies.  What could be more vintage meal appropriate than something with gelatin in it?  I ended up using Simply Lemonade instead of apple juice, because our grocery store didn't have any small bottles of apple juice.  If you would like to use homemade lemonade, I would be really excited about that.

Strawberry-Lemonade Jellies

The leftover cooked strawberries don't look very pretty (they'll be quite mushy and drained of color), but they taste pretty darn good.

*****

Eddie Condon playing at his eponymous club in New York, 1946

I've been listening to Eddie Condon this week.  I have a soft spot for Dixieland jazz.  I really don't know why, unless it was all that Lawrence Welk viewing at an impressionable age.

An Eddie Condon playlist from archive.org:


This post is linked to Vintage Recipe Thursday.  Be sure to check it out--just click on the image.

*Strawberry Jellies recipe 1, Strawberry Jellies recipe 2

Very Good Recipes tags: beef, bread, lettuce, strawberry, lemonade, gelatin