Chop 2 pounds of beef with ¼ pound of suet; add 4 small onions, 2 cloves of garlic and 3 sprigs of parsley chopped fine. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mix with some bread-crumbs and a beaten egg. Shape into a roll and lay in a baking-dish; moisten with broth and let bake until done. Serve on a platter with a border of mashed potatoes and garnish with fried parsley.
This is a baked meat roll — essentially a meatloaf shaped by hand rather than pressed into a pan. The original gives no quantities for the breadcrumbs, no oven temperature and no time, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- "Chop 2 pounds of beef"At the time this meant hand-chopping with a knife or running the meat through a hand grinder. Use 2 lb of coarsely ground beef, ideally chuck at about 20 percent fat.
- SuetA quarter pound of beef suet is added for richness. Ask a butcher for suet or beef fat, or skip it and use fatty ground chuck; with a very lean grind the roll will be dry.
- Breadcrumbs and egg"Some bread-crumbs" means roughly 1 cup of dry crumbs, or 1½ cups of fresh, for 2 lb of meat. One beaten egg is enough to bind that quantity. Soaking fresh crumbs in a few tablespoons of milk first gives a more tender roll.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. A free-formed roll about 4 inches thick will need 1 to 1¼ hours.
- The instruction that mattersGround meat must reach 160F at the centre. Check with a thermometer rather than by time — the shape of a hand-formed roll varies too much for a fixed schedule.
- Moistening with brothAdd about a cup of beef broth to the dish, not over the roll's surface, and spoon it back over every 20 minutes. This keeps the outside from drying while the pan liquid reduces into a light gravy for the platter.
- Garlic and nutmegTwo cloves of garlic and a grating of nutmeg for 2 lb of meat is a restrained hand by modern taste; the nutmeg will read as a background note rather than a distinct flavour. Season with about 2 teaspoons salt.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop sizzling, then drained. Wet parsley will spit violently, so dry it thoroughly first.
- YieldServes six generously, with the mashed potato border.
Baked or braised rolls of chopped meat are common across northern and eastern Europe, where the Russian word rulet covers much the same idea, and where a bound, extended forcemeat stretched a limited amount of beef across a large table. What marks this version as "Russian" in the author's mind is less any documented Russian original than the seasoning shorthand of the period: onion, garlic, parsley and a whisper of nutmeg are often said to have been the flavours American and English cookbooks turned to when a dish was labelled Russian or German. The book itself is a calendar cookbook, assigning one nation's dish to each day of the year, a popular publishing format around the turn of the twentieth century when readers were being introduced to "foreign cookery" a page at a time. The mashed potato border and fried parsley garnish, meanwhile, look like the hotel-dining-room convention of the era, applied to almost anything served on a platter.