If the beef has been stewed with proper care in a very gentle manner, and be taken up at "the critical moment when it is just tender," you will obtain an excellent and savoury meal for eight people for fivepence; _i. e._ for only the cost of the glass of port wine.
If you use veal, cover the meat with No. 364--2.
_Obs._--This is a most frugal, agreeable, and nutritive meal; it will neither lighten the purse, nor lie heavy on the stomach, and will furnish a plentiful and pleasant soup and meat for eight persons. So you may give a good dinner for 5_d._ per head!!! See also Nos. 229 and 239.
N.B. If you will draw your purse-strings a little wider, and allow 1_d._ per mouth more, prepare a pint of young onions as directed in No. 296, and garnish the dish with them, or some carrots or turnips cut into squares; and for 6_d._ per head you will have as good a RAGOUT as "_le Cuisinier Impérial de France_" can give you for as many shillings. Read _Obs._ to No. 493.
You may vary the flavour by adding a little curry powder (No. 455), ragoût (No. 457, &c.), or any of the store sauces and flavouring essences between Nos. 396 and 463; you may garnish the dish with split pickled mangoes, walnuts, gherkins, onions, &c. See Wow wow Sauce, No. 328.
If it is made the evening before the soup is wanted, and suffered to stand till it is cold, much fat[200-*] may be removed from the surface of the soup, which is, when clarified (No. 83), useful for all the purposes that drippings are applied to.
The three following receipts are the contribution of a friend at Edinburgh.
Take the best end of a neck or loin of mutton; cut it into neat chops; cut four carrots, and as many turnips into slices; put on four quarts of water, with half the carrots and turnips, and a whole one of each, with a pound of dried green pease, which must be put to soak the night before; let it boil two hours, then take out the whole carrot and turnip; bruise and return them; put in the meat, and the rest of the carrot and turnip, some pepper and salt, and boil slowly three-quarters of an hour; a short time before serving, add an onion cut small and a head of celery.
Take a scrag of mutton, or shank of veal, three quarts of water (or liquor in which meat has been boiled), and a good-sized fowl, with two or three leeks cut in pieces about an inch long, pepper and salt; boil slowly about an hour: then put in as many more leeks, and give it three-quarters of an hour longer: this is very good, made of good beef-stock, and leeks put in it twice.