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Beef Cakes
Make a mincemeat of one pound of underdone roast beef, a quarter of a pound of ham or bacon, a few sweet herbs, and a seasoning of salt and pepper. Add a large egg well beaten, and make up into square cakes of about half an inch thick. Fry quickly in good dripping, with bread-crumbs and a little more egg beaten up. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Time, from five to six minutes. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using up Sunday's roast, and it still works — provided you treat it as a fried patty with a crumb coat rather than a mixture to be cooked through from raw.
- "Mincemeat" means minced meatNo sugar, currants or spice is intended here. Chop or coarsely grind the cold beef; a food processor pulsed a few times is fine, but a purée will make the cakes pasty.
- Use cooked bacon or hamThe frying time is only long enough to brown and heat through, so the quarter pound of ham or bacon should already be cooked. Streaky bacon crisped in a pan and then chopped adds both fat and salt.
- Sweet herbsParsley, thyme and marjoram are a common Victorian combination, with a scrape of nutmeg if you like. About two tablespoons chopped for a pound of meat.
- Season with the ham in mindCured meat plus roast beef that was already salted means you need less salt than the wording suggests. Taste a pinch of the raw mix fried in a spoonful of dripping before shaping the rest.
- Half an inch, and chilledKeep to the stated thickness — thicker cakes stay cold in the middle within the short frying time. Half an hour in the refrigerator firms the egg-bound mixture so the squares hold their edges in the pan.
- The coatingThe instruction is compressed: dip the shaped cakes in the extra beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs, and fry. Dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, give the crust that holds up.
- Fat and heatBeef dripping is worth seeking out for the flavour, though clarified butter or a neutral oil will do. Shallow-fry at a brisk heat — medium-high — so the crumb colours in the two to three minutes a side that the five-to-six-minute total allows.
- Yield and servingThe book's three or four persons works only with something alongside: mashed potato, a brown gravy, or a sharp sauce.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of English leftover cookery, when a large joint was roasted on Sunday and the household cook was expected to make it reappear, unrecognisable, for several days after. Beef cakes sit in the same family as rissoles, croquettes and cutlets bound with egg, crumbed and fried — and the family resemblance is no accident, since the names themselves are French, and such dishes are often said to have reached English domestic manuals through French kitchen practice adapted for smaller households. The costing in shillings and pence, given here as 1s. 6d., was a standing feature of the dictionary and reflects a period when a housekeeper's competence was measured as much by economy as by flavour. The dripping called for was itself a by-product of the same roast, saved in a jar by the stove; it was a normal cooking fat in British homes well into the twentieth century, and its near-disappearance from domestic kitchens is usually attributed to a mix of causes, among them the falling cost of vegetable oil and changing dietary advice.