Midday Dinner (the hot meal of the day)
Boiled Beef with Carrots and Suet Dumplings
EverydayDocumented🧂 🍄moyen3 h
A piece of beef brisket simmered for hours with carrots and onions, served with flour and suet dumplings that swell in the broth. A one-pot dish, economical and filling, made for tight budgets.
Why this dish? "Boiled Beef and Carrots" was a great hit in the London music halls where Chaplin made his debut as a child. It is exactly the modest Sunday dish of Kennington: a cheap cut of beef, long-boiled to feed a whole household without breaking the bank — the frugality he kept all his life.
You see, at home in Kennington, a nice piece of beef was a small event, and my mother would make it last three days. She'd put it in the pot in the morning, with a few carrots and an onion, and the whole room would smell good until evening. The secret was the dumplings: a little flour, suet, a pinch of salt, and you'd let them swell in the broth like little balloons. When you've known hunger, believe me, such a dish seems like a king's feast.
Ingredients
- •Beef brisket or shin — a good piece (base)
- •Carrots — a bunch (vegetable)
- •Onions — two (aromatic)
- •Beef suet (kidney fat) — a handful (dumpling binder)
- •Flour — two handfuls (dumplings)
- •Pearl barley — a ladleful (thickens the broth)
How it was made : The toughest and cheapest cuts (brisket, shin) were chosen precisely because long boiling in water tenderized them. The broth was then used as soup the next day, and leftover meat was eaten cold: nothing was wasted.