A quick internet search reveals that most of the popular recipes these days have brief, memorable names. The exceptions are generally branded like “Cheesecake Factory Beef Wellington” or things that list their contents ala “Cheese, Potato, Sausage, Black Pepper, and Pimento Casserole.”
I do a lot of examination of the ways in which recipes get passed along, but what about their names?
I was at the Maryland Historical Society the other week doing my thing when I came across a recipe in Mrs. John Stump’s handwritten recipe book, for “A Nice Little Dish of Beef.”
“Mince cold roast beef very fine add chopped onion, pepper, salt & a little gravy, fill your dish two parts full, mash potatoes milk cream & butter & fill your dish, put it in oven to brown.”
The very un-catchy name stuck out at me so I did a search and found “A Nice Little Dish of Beef” in my database two other times. It’s printed in “Maryland’s Way,” where it is called “An original receipt” from the Ivy Neck papers from 1828. The other is from Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1873 book “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”
Those two recipes instruct the cook to “fill scallop shells two parts full” with minced beef and onion, before topping with creamy potatoes and butter and baking. I suppose the scallop shells make this dish of beef more “little” and perhaps even more “nice.”
I traced the recipe back to good old Mary Randolph, from whom Mrs. B. C. Howard and the author of the Ivy Neck receipt copied it verbatim, with name intact.
1856 issue of Southern Cultivator which printed the recipe for “A Nice Little Dish of Beef”
The word “nice” is used a lot in old cooking manuscripts, often as a comment from the author: “Tried this. Nice.”
According to the Oxford Dictionary:
“The word nice, derived from Latin nescius meaning ‘ignorant’, began life in the fourteenth century as a term for ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’. From there it embraced many a negative quality, including wantonness, extravagance, and ostentation, as well as cowardice and sloth. In the Middle Ages it took on the more neutral attributes of shyness and reserve. It was society’s admiration of such qualities in the eighteenth century that brought on the more positively charged meanings of ‘nice’ that had been vying for a place for much of the word’s history, and the values of respectability and virtue began to take over. Such positive associations remain today, when the main meaning of ‘nice’ is ‘pleasant’”
Perhaps this beef dish, a variant on shepherds or cottage pie (and obviously a use of leftovers), seemed a little bland or simple in comparison to the ostentatious plantation fare that Randolph’s reputation was associated with.
Whatever her logic, she derived the recipe from the popular 1806 British Cookbook “A New System of Domestic Cookery” by Maria Eliza Rundell. Rundell called it “Beef Sanders.” From there, it’s origin is lost, and the name unexplained.
We’ll never really know why Randolph renamed the succinct “Beef Sanders” to “A Nice Little Dish of Beef,” but it did have the interesting effect of starting a new, American continuance for the recipe, as it was copied again and again, name and all.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the recipe was occasionally published as “Scalloped Beef” or “Baked Minced Beef” before fading away altogether.
Which is a shame, because it is pretty tasty, versatile and hard to mess up. In a word, you know… nice.
Recipe:
From “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen”
Recipe notes: I ended up with sliced beef but whole would probably be better. I went heavy on the butter since the beef was lean and I didn’t have cream for the potatoes. Would be excellent with a shallot!
