Chop some fat beef with 1 onion and 2 sprigs of parsley. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and a little mace to taste and the grated rind of ½ lemon, 1 beaten egg and ½ cup of fine bread-crumbs. Mix all well together and shape into rolls. Then heat some dripping in a saucepan; lay in the rolls; cover and let simmer until brown. Serve hot with the sauce.
A seasoned minced-beef forcemeat shaped into rolls and cooked in dripping — closer to a British beef olive or a rissole than to anything stuffed. The original gives no quantities for the beef, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Working quantitiesThe egg and half-cup of crumbs would bind roughly 1 lb (450 g) of beef, though the original gives no weight at all. With the onion and crumbs that makes about four rolls of 4 oz each, enough for two people as a main course with potatoes.
- "Fat beef," choppedThis means beef with a good proportion of fat, hand-chopped on a board before mincers were universal. Coarse-ground chuck at about 20 percent fat is the modern equivalent; very lean mince will give dry, crumbly rolls.
- DrippingBeef dripping is the rendered fat from a roast and is still sold in the UK; bacon fat, lard or a neutral oil will all work. You need enough to film the pan generously, not to deep-fry.
- Brown first, then coverThe hinge of the dish. Covering a pan traps steam, and steamed meat will not brown. Sear the rolls uncovered in hot fat on all sides, then lower the heat, cover, and let them finish through — about 15 minutes, turning once.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy outer coat of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than the nut itself. A generous pinch of each is right; blade mace, if that is what you have, should be ground before it goes in.
- Cook it throughMinced meat cannot be judged by the outside. Ground beef wants an internal temperature of 160F (71C), which these rolls will reach comfortably in the covered stage.
- "The sauce"No sauce is given anywhere in the entry; the writer seems to have assumed the pan. Lift the rolls out, pour off most of the fat, deglaze with stock or water, and reduce; a spoonful of flour stirred into the fat first will give a thicker gravy if you want one.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest of the half lemon. The white pith beneath turns the seasoning bitter, and in a mixture this small it shows.
Rolls of seasoned chopped meat bound with egg and breadcrumbs run right through nineteenth-century British and Irish cookery under a shifting set of names — rissoles, croquettes, beef olives when a slice of meat is wrapped around stuffing rather than minced with it. What marks this version as a thrift dish is the fat beef and the dripping: both are the by-products of a household that roasted joints, and the pot of dripping kept by the stove was a standard kitchen fixture in Ireland and Britain well into the twentieth century. The flavourings — nutmeg, mace and lemon peel in a savoury meat mixture — are older still, a survival of the spiced forcemeats of Georgian cooking that were slowly retreating from British tables. Books of this kind, offering a dish a day labelled by nation, are generally thought to have circulated fairly widely, and their national attributions are best read as a marketing conceit rather than as documented regional cookery.