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BEEF GRISKINS (of Cold Meat, Roast or Boiled)
The best of these are the thin part of the ribs, the breast, or other portions of the bullock in which the fat and lean are equally mixed. Finely chop one or two onions or shallots, some parsley, and mix them with pepper, salt, grated nutmeg, and oiled butter, which last must be kept sufficiently warm to remain liquid. Cut the beef into slices about an inch thick; steep them in the above, turning them over from time to time. When they are well soaked, press them on both sides in bread-crumbs mixed with a little grated cheese. Grill them over a gentle fire till they are thoroughly heated, and nicely browned on both sides. While they are broiling, put the butter, onions, etc., in which they were steeped, into a saucepan, with a couple of table-spoonfuls of broth. Let it boil a few minutes, shaking it about; add a tea-spoonful of vinegar and a table-spoonful of ketchup, and serve in a sauceboat with the broiled griskins.
A Victorian way of making Monday's cold joint worth eating: slices steeped in seasoned melted butter, crumbed, grilled, and served with a quick sauce built from the marinade. The meat is already cooked, so the whole job is browning and heating through.
- "Griskin" hereProperly a griskin is the lean strip from a bacon pig's loin, but Cassell's uses the word loosely for a thick grilled slice. Read it as "cold roast or boiled beef, cut into steaks".
- Which cuts reheat wellThe book asks for well-marbled pieces — short rib, brisket, thin flank. Cold lean sirloin or topside will be dry and stringy by the time it browns; use the fattier trimmings of the joint if you have them.
- Oiled butterI.e. butter melted down until it is liquid; the recipe itself says it "must be kept sufficiently warm to remain liquid." Keep it barely warm; if it cools it sets on the meat and the crumbs will not stick evenly.
- KetchupIn an English book of this date, unqualified "ketchup" is mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin dark salty condiment, not tomato. A mushroom ketchup or a spoonful of Worcestershire sauce gives the intended savoury edge; tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet.
- The grated cheeseThe recipe says only "a little grated cheese"; in Victorian crumb coatings this usually meant Parmesan or a similar hard cheese. A hard, dry, well-aged cheese is what you want — anything moist will run and burn before the crust sets.
- "A gentle fire"The meat is cooked already, so the fire is only setting the crust. Under a domestic grill that means the middle shelf rather than hard under the element, and only a few minutes a side, until browned and heated through. Fierce heat scorches the cheesy crumbs long before the centre is warm.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons of broth for a whole marinade's worth of butter and onion gives a very small, very rich sauce — closer to a dressing. Scale the broth up to a quarter of a cup if you are serving four, and boil it hard enough to emulsify the butter rather than letting it split.
- YieldNo quantities are given for the beef because it depends on what is left over. Reckon one to two slices an inch thick per person, and one onion or two shallots for every pound of meat.
Recipes of this kind — "of Cold Meat" is a whole department in Victorian cookery books — exist because a middle-class household roasted or boiled a large joint on Sunday and was then obliged to eat it for several days. Cassell's, like Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton before it, treats the cold joint as a raw material rather than a leftover, and the standard trick is the one used here: cut thick, season aggressively, add fat back in, armour the outside with crumbs, and serve a sharp sauce with vinegar and ketchup to cut the reheated flavour. The bottled ketchups of the period, generally traced to mushroom and walnut preparations that predate the tomato version in Britain, were the workhorse seasoning of exactly this sort of dish — cheap, keeping indefinitely, and dark and salty enough to disguise a good deal.