French Beef
Take a circular piece of beef from the round, and after removing the bone, trim it nicely from the fat skin, etc. Then lard it all over with long slips of fat pork or bacon. The place from whence the bone was taken must be filled with a force-meat made of minced suet, grated bread crumbs, sweet marjoram rubbed fine and grated lemon peel; add a little salt and pepper, and mix in the beaten yolk of one egg, to bind together the other ingredients. The twine or tape closely round the outside of the beef, to keep it compact and in shape.
Put it into a broad earthen jar with a cover, or into an iron bake oven. Add some whole pepper, a large onion stuck over with a dozen cloves, a bouquet of sweet herbs, three bay leaves, a quarter of a pound of butter, divided into small bits (each piece rolled in flour), and a pint of claret or port wine. Bake or stew it thus in its own liquor for five, six or seven hours (in proportion to its size), for it must be thoroughly done, quite tender, and brown all through the inside. Serve it hot, with the gravy round it. It is also very good when cold.
This is a larded, stuffed round of beef braised in wine — a French boeuf à la mode in all but name. The original assumes a butcher who will bone the round for you and a fire you judge by feel, so a few specifics are worth fixing before you start.
- The cut"A circular piece of beef from the round" with a bone in it suggests a cross-cut slice of the whole hind leg — a thick bone-in round roast. The recipe gives no weight, only the instruction to judge the time by size. Ask for a thick bone-in round roast, or use a boneless top or bottom round and cut a deep pocket for the stuffing.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of fat pork or bacon through the meat with a larding needle, not draping it on top. Round is very lean and this is the whole reason the dish works; if you have no larding needle, pierce the roast with a thin knife and push in cold strips of salt pork or thick bacon with the handle of a spoon.
- Force-meatSuet is raw beef kidney fat, still available from a proper butcher; grated bread crumbs means dry crumbs from stale bread, not packaged fine crumbs. A workable ratio is roughly equal volumes suet and crumbs — about a cup of each — with a teaspoon of dried marjoram, the zest of one lemon, and the egg yolk to bind.
- Oven temperatureFor the six-hour version give it 300F, covered. The dish is a braise despite the word "bake," and the liquid must never do more than tremble; a hard boil in the oven will squeeze the round dry no matter how long it goes.
- The vessel"An iron bake oven" is a lidded Dutch oven, and the earthen jar its ceramic equivalent. Either is fine so long as the lid is close-fitting — the pint of wine plus the meat's own juices are all the liquid this gets, and evaporation is the main risk.
- The butter and flourQuarter pound of butter is 4 oz / 1 stick, cut in bits and each rolled in flour, which thickens the liquor as it melts in much the way beurre manié does. Use about 2 tablespoons flour in total for the coating.
- TimingFive hours is plausible for a smaller roast at 300F, seven for something larger, as the recipe itself says. The test is not the clock but a skewer sliding in with no resistance; undercooked round is tough rather than merely pink.
- WineA pint (2 cups) of claret means dry red Bordeaux or any dry red; port will give a noticeably sweeter, heavier gravy. Skim the fat from the liquor before serving — the larding pork releases a good deal of it.
- Yield and the cold versionA roast of this size will serve eight to ten. Served cold as the note suggests, the strained liquor may set to a light jelly from the connective tissue — the bone having been taken out at the start; chill the meat under a weight and slice thin.
Larding a lean round, stuffing the bone cavity with a suet force-meat, and stewing it for most of a day in red wine with a clove-stuck onion is close to the method often described for boeuf à la mode, the French braise that English and American cookbooks had been adapting since the eighteenth century — though the stuffed force-meat cavity is not part of the classic French preparation. The name "French Beef" tells you how the dish was understood in an American household kitchen: not as a specific regional preparation but as evidence of a French manner of cooking, meaning wine in the pot, a bouquet of herbs, and patience. It is also thrifty cooking dressed as company food. Round is one of the cheapest parts of the animal and nearly unusable as a roast, and every element here — the pork fat threaded through it, the closed vessel, the six hours — exists to make it behave like something better. The closing note that it is good cold is not an afterthought; a joint like this was expected to appear again on the supper table, sliced thin with its own jelly.