Roast Beef
Take six or eight pounds of sirloin ; wipe, trim, and skewer into shape. If there be much flank, cut it off and use it for soups or stew. Lay the meat on a rack in the pan, and dredge all over with salt, pepper and flour; put it in a very hot oven with two or three tablespoonfuls of dripping or pieces of the beef fat placed in the pan. Place a rack under the pan or turn the heat off from the bottom of the oven. Put the skin side down first, that the heat may harden the juices in the lean part. When the flour is brown, baste the meat and reduce the heat. Baste often and dredge twice with salt and flour. When seared all over, turn the skin side up for the final basting and browning. Bake fifty minutes, if liked very rare; an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, if liked well done. Serve with Yorkshire pudding.
A straightforward high-heat roast, written for a range whose bottom burner could be shut off independently. The instructions assume constant attention rather than a thermometer, so that is the main substitution to make.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures. "A very hot oven" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 450-475F. "Reduce the heat" is unspecified; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, is a reasonable modern interpretation for the remainder of the cooking.
- The bottom-heat instructionPlacing a rack under the pan or turning off the bottom heat was a way to keep the drippings from scorching on a coal or early gas range. In a modern oven, set the roast on the middle rack and ignore this step.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFifty minutes for six to eight pounds of sirloin is genuinely rare, an internal reading around 120-125F at the thickest point. Around 135F is medium rare, 145F medium. Whether the upper timing given here, an hour and a half, actually reaches well done will depend on the oven and the shape of the roast; trust the thermometer.
- Dredging with flourThe flour, salt and pepper form a crust and, with the fat, the base of the gravy. Use a light, even dusting; heavy coating gums up rather than browns.
- BastingFrequent basting does little for the interior of the meat and costs oven heat every time the door opens. Two or three bastings are plenty, and a rest of 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving matters far more.
- DrippingBeef dripping is rendered beef fat, still sold by butchers. Trimmed fat from the roast itself, as the recipe suggests, works as well.
- The flank and the fat cap"Skin side" here means the fat side. Starting it down puts the fat between the lean and the hottest part of the pan; finishing it up gives the browned cap. Modern boneless sirloin roasts often come with the fat already trimmed thin, in which case start fat side up and skip the flip.
- Yorkshire puddingThe pudding depends on the hot beef drippings and a hot oven, so pour off the fat before the roast rests and get the pudding in while the oven is still up at roasting heat.
- YieldSix to eight pounds of sirloin serves eight to twelve, with enough left for cold beef the next day.
Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding was already a national emblem in Britain long before this book was printed, and American cookbooks reproduced it as the standard company dinner. The particular technique here -- dredging with flour and searing hard before reducing the heat -- reflects the older belief that a seared surface "hardens the juices" and seals them in, an idea generally traced to the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the mid-nineteenth century and repeated in household manuals for decades afterward. It has since been disproved; searing browns and flavors the surface but does not seal anything. The advice to shut off the bottom heat suggests a kitchen where gas ranges were replacing coal, and cooks needed instructions that worked on either. Sirloin in this period usually meant a large bone-in cut from the loin end, considerably fattier than the trimmed boneless roasts sold under that name now.</p>