Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef, Lumber, in Madeira Sauce
Beef, Lumber, in Madeira Sauce
Roast three pounds of beef, for half an hour only. Prepare a sauce with brown stock or broth, some butter, flour, cayenne, salt, pepper, and a glass of Madeira. Put the half-cooked beef into a stewpan with the sauce, and simmer, but do not boil, for the same time. Mushrooms or truffles add to the delicacy. Time, half an hour to roast, same to simmer. Probable cost of lumber, 1s. 4d. per pound.
A two-stage method: the joint is roasted rare, then finished gently in a Madeira sauce so the meat takes up the flavour without toughening. Cassell's assumes a cook who already knows how to make a brown sauce, so the quantities are left open.
- What "lumber" meansProbably the lumbar cut — the loin, along the back — though this is a reading rather than a documented butcher's term, and the word may simply be a misprint for "lumbar". At 1s. 4d. a pound this sits at the dearer end for beef; use a boneless sirloin or a well-trimmed piece of striploin of about 3 lb.
- The roasting is deliberately shortHalf an hour for 3 lb leaves the interior rare, which is the point. Roast in a hot oven, around 425F, and pull the joint at roughly 115-120F internal; it finishes in the sauce.
- Simmer means simmerThe hinge of the dish. Once the beef is in the sauce, hold it at a bare tremble — around 180F — for the second half hour. A boil will squeeze the loin dry and grey in minutes.
- A glass of MadeiraA Victorian wine glass is about 2 fl oz, so a scant quarter cup. Use a sercial or verdelho for a drier sauce, bual if you want it rounder; avoid supermarket "Madeira cooking wine", which is salted.
- Building the sauceButter and flour in equal weight, cooked to a nut-brown roux, then let down with about a pint of brown stock for a 3 lb joint. Add the Madeira near the end so it does not cook away entirely.
- Cayenne and seasoningCayenne varies a good deal in strength, so add it cautiously. An eighth of a teaspoon in a pint of sauce is plenty; season the salt at the end, after the stock has reduced.
- Mushrooms or trufflesSliced brown mushrooms, sweated in butter first so they do not water down the sauce, are the practical option. If using truffle, shaving it in off the heat at the end preserves the most aroma, though black truffle of the kind a Victorian kitchen would have had tolerates gentle cooking.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of loin serves six. Carve across the grain, nap with the sauce, and serve with something plain — boiled potatoes or a purée — since the sauce is the feature.
Madeira held a peculiar place in the Victorian kitchen: fortified for the long sea voyage and deliberately heated in transit, it survived opened bottles and warm larders better than table wine, which made it the standard cooking wine of the English cook's brown sauces alongside sherry. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery, compiled for a growing middle-class readership, are arranged alphabetically like a reference book and quote a price for nearly every entry — the 1s. 4d. per pound here marks this out as a costly joint, not everyday eating. The name "lumber" has sometimes been explained as the lumbar cut, the loin, though the derivation is uncertain. The recipe works in two stages — roast, then finish in sauce.