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Basting
The meat should be basted from time to time, and if you wish the meat frothed, just after the last basting, dredge it very lightly with well-dried flour and give it time to crisp. The imperative rule for baking meats is to have a quick fire and baste frequently. Never parboil meat that is to be roasted. If it is frozen thaw it out in cold water before putting it in the oven, always wiping it dry after taking it from the water. There is another thing that should be observed with all meats that are to be roasted, broiled or fried. They should be kept in a cool place after being killed, until ready for cooking. This breaks down the fiber and renders the flesh tender. XI. Beef a la Mode.
THIS is a fillet or round of beef with rich stuffing, whether stewed or baked. A round of beef is prepared as follows: Cut out the bone and fill with rich stuffing of bread-crumbs seasoned with pepper, salt and onions; mix together a teaspoonful each of pepper, salt, cloves, mace and nutmeg. Make incisions in the beef and place thereon strips of salt fat pork rolled in the spices. Sprinkle the remainder over the beef, and cover the whole with strips of fat pork. Tie it all round with tape, and skewer it well, put in the oven in a dripping-pan containing plenty of water, say three quarts, and bake from four to six hours, according to the size of the piece,
Two things are running together here: a short set of rules on basting and roasting, and a full recipe for beef à la mode. The recipe as written is closer to a braise than a roast, and that gap is where most of the confusion lies.
- Three quarts of water makes this a braiseWith that much liquid in the dripping-pan the beef steams and stews rather than roasts, whatever the heading says. Expect a pot-roast texture, and keep the pan covered or the liquid will boil away long before the four hours are up.
- "A quick fire"The book gives no temperatures and assumes a range judged by eye; a hot oven, roughly in the 425-450F region, is the nearest modern equivalent. For a stuffed round sitting in water, a short blast at that heat to set the surface and then a moderate oven (around 325F) for the long haul gives a better result than four hours of high heat.
- Cooking time and donenessFour to six hours suits a large round cooked to falling-apart tenderness, around 195-205F internal; the recipe itself gives no weight, only 'according to the size of the piece'. Pulled at 135-140F it will be pink but tough; this cut wants either well past or well short of the recipe's timing, not the middle.
- Tape and skewers"Tape" is cotton butcher's tape or twine, used to hold the fat pork and stuffing in place. Kitchen string works identically. Remove it before carving.
- Salt fat porkSalt pork is still sold, usually near the bacon. Unsmoked fatback or thick-cut pancetta substitutes; smoked bacon does not, as the smoke overwhelms the clove and mace. The strips pushed into incisions are lardons, there to baste the lean round from inside.
- The spice mixA teaspoon each of pepper, salt, cloves, mace and nutmeg is a strong hand by modern taste, particularly the cloves. Half that quantity of clove and nutmeg, with the mace and pepper left as written, reads better to a contemporary palate.
- Thawing in cold waterPeriod practice was to thaw a frozen joint in a basin of cold water. Current food-safety guidance is to thaw in the refrigerator, or in cold water changed every thirty minutes with the meat cooked immediately afterward. A large round left in standing water at room temperature spends too long in the range where bacteria multiply.
- "Kept in a cool place after being killed"This is dry-aging, written for households that butchered their own or bought from a butcher who hung carcasses. Supermarket beef has already been aged, wet or dry, before it reaches the case; no further hanging is needed or advisable at home.
Beef à la mode is the French bœuf à la mode naturalised into English: larded, spiced, and braised for hours, the standard treatment for the tough working muscles of the hindquarter. English cookery books were printing versions under that name by the eighteenth century, and it crossed to American kitchens early enough that "alamode beef" appears as a shop-bought dish in nineteenth-century cities, sold by the slice from cook-shops. The name means simply "in the fashion," which by 1900 it no longer was in any strict sense; it had become a fixed term for spiced braised beef. What dates this particular version is the surrounding advice: instructions on hanging meat after slaughter, on thawing a frozen joint, and on frothing a roast with dredged flour all belong to a household that dealt with whole large cuts and had no thermostat, judging the oven by the fire and the meat by eye.