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Beef, Baked
Take about two pounds of thin slices of cold roast beef, sprinkle over them a little salt and a dust of flour; roll them neatly up with a small portion of fat between each roll, and lay them in the bottom of a pie-dish. Slice two carrots and a turnip and parboil them; lay them with thinly-sliced onion and minced herbs over the meat, and proceed with another layer of beef as before till all is used up. The vegetables should be next to the paste, and should be dusted over with pepper and salt. Mix a tea-spoonful of flour with about half a pint of good gravy, free from grease, and two or three table-spoonfuls of ale; put this into the dish and bake three-quarters of an hour, covered with a crust, or mashed potatoes if preferred. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A frugal Victorian way of turning Sunday's cold roast into a covered dish for Monday. The whole thing hinges on the fact that the beef is already cooked.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven setting, only three-quarters of an hour. A moderate oven, around 350F/180C, is a reasonable modern reading: long enough to set a pastry lid and heat the filling through. If you use mashed potato instead, a hotter oven will brown the top better.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. It should be real roast-beef gravy or a well-reduced beef stock; a thin stock will leave the dish watery, since nothing here simmers long enough to concentrate it.
- Parboil the root vegetablesThe recipe calls for it, and it is worth doing: the bake is short and the slices sit above the gravy rather than in it. Eight to ten minutes in boiling salted water, sliced no thicker than a coin.
- Don't overcook the beefThe meat is already roasted. The bake is only to warm it and marry the gravy; longer than an hour and the rolled slices go dry and stringy no matter how much fat you tuck between them.
- "Next to the paste"Paste means pastry. The recipe is explicit that the vegetables should be the top layer, against the lid, and dusted with pepper and salt. Follow the layering as given.
- The aleTwo or three tablespoons of a mild English ale or bitter, not a hoppy IPA, which turns bitter when reduced. Its job is depth, not flavour you can identify.
- Minced herbsThe recipe does not say which. Parsley and thyme are the usual choice for a dish of this kind, sometimes with a little marjoram or savoury. A tablespoon of chopped parsley and a teaspoon of thyme leaves suits two pounds of meat.
- YieldFour or five, as stated, with the crust and a further vegetable alongside.
Baked or "made" dishes of cold roast beef fill the reheating chapters of nineteenth-century English cookery books, where a large joint was roasted for the principal meal and the remains had to appear again in a form that did not look like leftovers. Cassell's Dictionary, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, was written for households that bought meat in substantial pieces and had no refrigeration beyond a cool larder, which made prompt, thorough reuse a matter of economy and of safety. Rolling the slices with fat between them and burying them under gravy and root vegetables is a practical answer to the chief problem of reheated beef, which is that it dries out. The layer of pastry or mashed potato over the top serves the same end, sealing in steam, and the recipe offers the two simply as alternatives.