Season a rib-roast of beef with salt, pepper and ginger and rub with vinegar. Put in the dripping-pan with 1 sliced onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 carrots, 2 stalks of celery cut fine, 1 bay-leaf and a few cloves and peppercorns. Pour over 1 cup of stock and dredge with flour. Let bake in a quick oven; allow fifteen minutes to the pound. Serve with potato dumplings.
A short set of directions that assumes you already know how to roast; the details worth pinning down are the oven, the timing, and what happens to the vegetables in the pan.
- "A quick oven"Read this as 425-450F. At that heat for the whole cooking time a rib roast will darken hard before the centre is done; sear 20-30 minutes at 450F, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundAt this heat that lands roughly in the rare to medium-rare range, and it is only a rough guide because it ignores the shape of the joint. Use an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from bone: 125-130F for rare, 135F for medium-rare, then rest 20 minutes.
- The vinegar rubA wipe of vinegar over the seasoned fat; with the ginger it reads as a faint echo of sauerbraten. Cider or wine vinegar, not distilled.
- Dripping-panAny heavy roasting pan. The vegetables sit directly under the meat rather than in a rack, so they catch the drippings and there is no need to add fat.
- One cup of stockNot enough for a long roast. Check every 30 minutes and top up with a splash of hot stock or water; if the pan dries the aromatics burn and the gravy turns bitter.
- Dredge with flourA light dusting over the fat cap, done at the start, browns into a crust and thickens the pan juices as they reduce. If you want a proper sauce, strain the pan liquid, press the vegetables through a sieve into it, and reduce.
- Cloves and peppercornsThe recipe leaves "a few" undefined; three or four whole cloves is plenty, as they dominate quickly. Strain them out before serving.
- Potato dumplingsAustrian Erdäpfelknödel, made from riced boiled potato, a little flour and egg, poached in salted water. They exist to soak up the pan gravy, so make the sauce loose rather than thick.
- YieldFigure about a pound of bone-in rib per person; a three-rib roast of about 6 lb serves six.
This comes from a genre of book popular either side of 1900: a dish a day, each labelled with a nation, so that a household cook could serve something different for a year without owning a shelf of foreign cookbooks. The Viennese entry is a fair sketch of Austrian roasting practice, where beef is treated with more acid and more spice than in the English tradition " the vinegar rub, the ginger, the cloves and the bed of root vegetables point toward the same handling of beef that, in its longer marinated form, produces sauerbraten. Vienna's reputation rested less on roasts than on boiled beef, Tafelspitz, but a rib roast was what an American reader could buy and understand, and the potato dumpling served alongside was the recognisable marker of Central Europe on the plate.