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Beef, Roast
For roasting, the sirloin of beef is considered the prime joint. Before the meat is put upon the spit, the pipe which runs down the bone should be cut out; cover the fat with a piece of white paper fastened on with string. Make up a good strong fire, with plenty of coals put on at the back. Put it rather near the fire at first, and in a short time draw it back, and keep it about eighteen inches from the grate. Baste continually all the time it is roasting, at first with a little butter or fresh dripping, afterwards its own fat will be sufficient. If the basting is kept up as it should be, the joint will not need to have flour dredged over it before it is removed from the fire. The time it will take in roasting depends upon the thickness of the piece; a piece of sirloin weighing about fifteen pounds should be roasted for three hours and a half, while a thinner piece, though of the same weight, may be done in three hours. It must also be remembered that it takes longer to roast when newly killed than when it has been kept, and longer in cold weather than in warm.
This is spit-roasting in front of an open fire, not oven-roasting, and almost every instruction follows from that difference. The method translates cleanly enough if you work by internal temperature rather than by the clock.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not timeThe author's own caveats — thickness, how long the beef has hung, the weather — are all admissions that time is unreliable. A thermometer in the thickest part away from bone settles it: 125-130F for rare, 135F for medium rare, 145F for medium, taken before resting.
- Translating the fire to an ovenAn eighteen-inch distance from a banked coal fire gives fierce radiant heat on one face with constant turning. The nearest equivalent is 450F for the first 20-30 minutes to colour the outside, then 325F for the remainder. Roast fat side up on a rack so the joint sits above its own drippings.
- Timing as a rough guideFifteen pounds in three and a half hours is about fourteen minutes to the pound. In a 325F oven allow roughly 15-18 minutes per pound for rare, but treat that as a signal to start checking rather than a finish line.
- "The pipe which runs down the bone"This is generally understood to be the spinal cord channel and the gristly connective matter alongside the chine bone in a bone-in sirloin. Any butcher will remove it and saw through the chine for you; ask when you order, since it makes carving vastly easier.
- The sirloin in questionA British sirloin is the loin joint on the bone, sold in the United States as a standing strip loin or short loin roast — not the American "sirloin steak" cut from further back. A whole 15 lb joint is a banquet piece; a 5-6 lb roast serves eight to ten and behaves the same way.
- Paper on the fatPlain white paper tied over the fat is a caul against scorching from direct radiant heat. In an oven it is unnecessary; if the fat cap darkens too fast, tent loosely with foil.
- Basting and the flour dredgeConstant basting matters at an open fire, where the surface dries in the draught. In a closed oven it does little for juiciness and costs you oven heat every time the door opens — baste two or three times at most. The flour dredge was a fallback to give a browned crust when basting had been neglected; skip it.
- RestingThe original says nothing about it. Rest the joint loosely covered for 20-30 minutes; the temperature will climb several degrees and the juices will stay in the meat rather than on the board.
Cassell's was published into a period when the spit and the open range were giving way to the closed iron oven, and this entry sits squarely on the fault line — it still assumes a fire built up with coals at the back and a joint turning eighteen inches away from it. Roast beef of this kind carried a weight beyond dinner: the sirloin on the bone was the national dish in the English imagination, and the story that a king knighted a loin of beef, hence "Sir Loin", was already an old and cheerfully false etymology by the time this book appeared (the word comes from the French surlonge, above the loin). The remark that newly killed beef takes longer to cook than beef that has been kept is a glimpse of a household that hung its meat as a matter of course, and judged a joint by how long it had waited as much as by what it weighed.