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A sustainable, historical three-course feast: Victorian beef fritters

Published: March 24, 2024 at 9:19 PM

Serves 4 - 7

Difficulty 3/10

Total time: 1 hr

In this three-part series, Eleanor Barnett shows how leftovers can be used to make a starter, main course and dessert inspired by different periods in British history. Here she makes a Victorian fritter recipe using leftover beef

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For most people living before the 19th century, food was seasonal and locally sourced. Any leftover meat at slaughter was preserved in salty brines or pickles; vegetables were kept in vinegar; milk became long-lasting cheese; and Tudor gentry women, for example, preserved fruits in sugar to last through the barren winter months.

The world of food was shrinking in the Victorian period, however, as the tin can – invented in the 1810s – moved food across continents without the need for salt, sugar or fermentation, while experiments in refrigera- tion meant that by 1900, half of all the lamb and mutton eaten in Britain was imported in huge, refrigerated ships all the way from Australia and New Zealand.

Our feast’s main course, Victorian beef fritters, was partly a reaction to those 19th-century changes. Adapted from a recipe found in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), the dish was aimed at urban middle-class housewives who had become distanced from traditional cooking and preservation techniques, and who – in the eyes of the book’s author, Isabella Beeton – needed to know about the benefits of saving food and simpler, rural lifestyles. Even today, more than 160 years on, the fritters are a delicious way to use up the remains of roast beef, and the batter works well for any leftover vegetables, too.

More in this series

• Budget broccoli soup
• Ww2 crumb fudge

Ingredients

• 100g Leftover roast beef

• 340g Plain flour

• 275ml Water

• 50g Butter

• 2 Egg whites

• Onion

• 50g Lard

  for frying

• Salt and pepper

  to taste

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Method

• step 1

  Mix the flour with the water, adding a little at a time.

• step 2

  Melt the butter in a pan or microwave and add to the batter.

• step 3

  Finely chop the onion and add to the batter.

• step 4

  Whisk two egg whites and add to the batter (if it is thicker than pancake batter, add a little more water at this point).

• step 5

  Chop the leftover meat up into thin slices, season with salt and pepper, and add it to the batter.

• step 6

  Fry a dollop at a time in hot lard for five minutes on each side until browned.

Eleanor Barnett is a food historian at Cardiff University and @Historyeats on Instagram. Her new book, Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation (Apollo) is out now

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