Potted Beef

For my first recipe I have been reading

THINGS MOTHER USED TO MAKE

By LYDIA MARIA GURNEY

A collection of old time recipes, some nearly one hundred years old and never published before. 

New York 1914


=Potted Beef=
3 Pounds of a Cheap Cut of Beef 1/2 Can of Tomatoes Salt to taste 3 Onions

Put the meat into a kettle, cover with cold water and boil slowly for three or four hours. Add salt and onions, cut fine. Put the tomato through a colander. Boil all together, and, as the water boils away, add more. Serve the meat hot. The liquor makes a delicious soup, thickened with two tablespoonfuls of flour.


We buy our beef from local farmers.  Our last batch had several steaks that are quite tough.  I figured this recipe would be a great one to try with those steaks.  Because the recipe is a slow cooking one, I decided to modernize it by using a crockpot.  The crockpot can be a busy mom's best friend!


Potted Beef
3 pounds of tough beef with fat trimmed off
1 14.5oz can of stewed tomatoes
3 onions chopped


Put the beef in your crockpot and just cover with water.  Cook on high for approximately four hours.  Remove meat from crockpot at this point and cut into bite sized pieces.  Use scissors to chop the stewed tomatoes while still in the can.  Put onions and tomatoes in crockpot along with the cut up meat.  Cook for another two hours on high.
Salt and pepper to taste.


This was a really good recipe.  The only changes I will make next time is to reduce the amount of onions and increase the cook time.  Three onions was a bit much for our family, next time I will probably only use one.  The onions were not as soft as I would have liked, I will increase the cook time to three hours after adding the onions and tomatoes next time.  I served this with garlic mashed potatoes and cooked carrots.  We will definitely have this again.