Roast Beef
Take a rib-piece or loin-roast of seven to eight pounds. Beat it thoroughly all over, lay it in the roasting dish and baste it with melted butter. Put it inside the well-heated oven, and baste frequently with its own fat, which will make it brown and tender. If, when it is cooking fast, the gravy is growing too brown, turn a glass of German cooking wine into the bottom of the pan, and repeat this as often as the gravy cooks away. The roast needs about two hours time to be done, and must be brown outside but inside still a little red. Season with salt and pepper. Squeeze a little lemon juice over it, and also turn the gravy upon it, after skimming off all fat. - Mrs. L. S. Williston, Heidelberg, Germany.
A German-inflected roast from an American book, and one of the few nineteenth-century beef recipes that asks for a pink interior. The instructions are sound; only the oven and the wine need translating.
- The hinge: temperature, not time"Brown outside but inside still a little red" is medium-rare, which is 130-135F on an instant-read thermometer at the thickest point away from bone. Two hours for a 7-8 lb roast presumes a hot start; pull it at temperature and rest it 20 minutes before carving, as the reading will climb several degrees.
- "Well-heated oven"The recipe gives no temperature, and no exact figure can be recovered from the phrase; a hot oven is all that is implied. A practical approach is 450F for the first 20-30 minutes to set the crust, then 325F for the remainder, which gets you closer to the even interior the recipe implies.
- Rib-piece or loin-roastA rib-piece is a standing rib roast (prime rib); the loin-roast is a strip or sirloin roast. A 7-8 lb bone-in rib is three to four ribs and serves 8-10. Bone-in cooks slower than boneless of the same weight.
- "Beat it thoroughly all over"Pounding a prime rib is no longer done and does the meat no favors. Modern equivalent: dry the surface well, salt it generously an hour or more ahead, and let it come toward room temperature so it browns rather than steams.
- German cooking wineProbably an ordinary table wine of the sort kept for the kitchen rather than the salted "cooking wine" sold today, which will make the gravy inedibly salty. The recipe does not specify a colour, though German wine of the period was predominantly white; a dry Riesling or any dry white works, about half a cup per addition.
- Basting with its own fatFrequent basting does little for tenderness and repeatedly drops the oven temperature. If you want the browning it gives, baste two or three times only, and rely on a dry, salted surface for the crust.
- The pan gravySkimming the fat is essential here, since a rib roast throws a great deal of it. Deglaze the pan with a little more wine or stock, reduce, then skim; the lemon juice at the end is what keeps a rich beef gravy from tasting flat and is worth keeping.