Cut several deep incisions in the upper round of beef and press into them lardoons of salt pork. Stick 2 cloves of sliced garlic and 1 dozen cloves in the meat; season with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. Put in the dripping-pan with some hot water and let roast until tender. Serve with boiled macaroni.
A larded, clove-studded round of beef cooked with water in the pan — a braise in all but name, despite the title. The success of it rests on treating it as such.
- It is a pot roast, not a roastIt is closer to a pot roast than a roast -- upper (top) round is lean and full of connective tissue, and dry roasting it to "tender" tends to give grey, stringy meat. The hot water in the dripping-pan does much of the work. The recipe gives no oven temperature and does not say to cover the pan; covering it and holding a moderate oven around 325F, adding water as it cooks down until a fork slides in freely, is one workable adaptation -- allow perhaps 3 to 3½ hours for a piece of around 4 lb.
- LardoonsStrips of salt pork about the thickness of a pencil, pushed into deep slits with the point of a knife or a larding needle. Rinse the pork if it is heavily cured, or the finished meat will be too salty once the pan juices reduce.
- The clovesA dozen whole cloves in a single roast is assertive by current taste. Six is plenty for most palates, and they are easier to fish out at carving if you push them into the same slits as the pork.
- "2 cloves of sliced garlic"Read as two garlic cloves, sliced, and tucked into the incisions. The wording collides awkwardly with the spice cloves in the next breath, but the sense is clear.
- The flour dredgeFlour on the outside browns and then thickens the pan liquid into gravy as it cooks. Browning the floured meat in fat on the stovetop first, before the water goes in, will get colour that a covered braise will not.
- ServingThe recipe says only "boiled macaroni", with no sauce specified; the pan gravy is the obvious dressing. Slice the beef thin across the grain.
This is Italian by suggestion rather than descent — a lean cut studded with pork fat and garlic, braised slowly and served with macaroni, which was shorthand for "Italian" in American and British cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. The technique behind it is genuinely old and continental: larding lean beef with salt pork to baste it from within was long-standing practice, and stuffing a joint with whole cloves and garlic belongs to the same tradition as the French boeuf à la mode. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each pinned to a nation — were selling variety to home cooks working through a limited repertoire, and the national label often did more work than the recipe did. The macaroni on the side is the concession to the title.