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Cold Salt Beef and Green Sauce

If you are lucky enough to know a butcher who puts brisket and silverside in a brine cure, it is an easy and quite economical dish to cook for one meal. Hopefully, there will be leftovers for following days, to eat in sandwiches with mustard or as a salad with a herb sauce.

Serves 6–8

1.5-2kg/3¼4½lb piece of boned. rolled salt-cured silverside or brisket

1 clove

1 star anise

1 bay leaf

For the green sauce:

5 sprigs of parsley, chopped (or chervil, if you can find it)

3 sprigs of tarragon, chopped

4 sprigs of basil, chopped

about 2 tablespoons chopped chives

1 tablespoon chopped cornichons (baby gherkins)

1 heaped teaspoon capers, rinsed and chopped

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

6 tablespoons olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Soak the beef in cold water for a few hours or overnight, changing the water once or twice. Drain the beef and put it in a large pan with enough water to cover. Add the clove, star anise and bay leaf, bring to the boil, then turn the heat down so the water is barely boiling – ‘murmuring’ is a good description. Simmer for 2–3 hours, until the meat is tender when pierced with a knife. Lift out, wrap in foil and leave to rest for a good hour.

To make the sauce, mix all the ingredients together, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve slices of the lukewarm beef with the sauce and a potato salad. You could make the bacon and potato salad, omitting the bacon.

Beef – the valuable cuts

Now and again I turn to the special parts of beef for food to feast on – the sirloins, fillets, rump steaks and forerib. All can be cooked quickly, can be eaten rare and never toughen. Eating a grilled steak is an easy task – sometimes too easy with fillet steak, which can be tender to the point of dullness and lacks the flavour of a good rump steak.

These cuts form a small percentage of the meat on a beef animal, and have prices that match their economy of scale. Economic to buy they are not. It is not unusual to see well-trimmed fillet sold at over £35 per kilo. That’s more than £8 per helping, so it is a meal that I will not serve for supper any old day.

What matters is to recognise that these are not cuts that should be eaten every day, even if your means make them affordable. A farmer goes to immense trouble over the years to rear a steer to perfection, yet there is only enough fillet to feed about 20 people from it. A butcher must trim off a good proportion of the fillet once it has been extracted from the carcass, because it is unsaleable with the untidiness of stray pieces of beef and some membrane. This meat is chucked into the mince and sold for pence, not pounds. For every fillet in a beef side there’s an awful lot of much less valuable meat that is a hard job for the butcher to sell. It’s not really acceptable for someone who says they love beef to eat only the fillet or sirloin. Demand for fillet is a demand for a whole animal to be reared and slaughtered and there is – bossy as it sounds – a collective responsibility to find uses for the other cuts. I am not suggesting buying the whole cow, but you can buy beef boxes from some butchers and mail-order services. You can also ask for bones. They are free, and a source of good stock, marrow or even canine happiness. Butchers and meat producers pay to have bones and waste material removed and disposed of.

So, if I haven’t made you feel too guilty …