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Beef Roll
Take four pounds of cold roast or boiled beef; mince it well; season it to taste with ordinary condiments and chopped herbs, and put it into a roll of puff-paste. Bake for half an hour, or longer if the paste is thick. The French prepare a roll of meat in the above method, wrap a buttered paper round it, and cover with a coarse paste of flour and water, and bake it in a moderate oven for a couple of hours, that is, if the meat weigh say four pounds. The paper and crust is then removed, and the roll served with a little brown gravy. As a rule, any meat baked in a coarse crust this way, will repay the cook for her trouble.
Two dishes in one entry: a mince of cooked beef baked in puff pastry, and the French method of sealing a shaped roll of meat in a flour-and-water crust that is never eaten. Both hinge on moisture, because already-cooked beef has little left to give.
- Moisten the minceFour pounds of cold roast beef, minced and baked dry, will be sawdust. Work in a cup or so of well-reduced gravy, stock or the jellied juices from under the roast until the mixture just holds together, and it will slice instead of crumbling.
- "Ordinary condiments"Most likely salt, black pepper, and perhaps a grating of nutmeg or a pinch of mace; herbs would be parsley and thyme, sometimes marjoram. Anchovy essence or a spoonful of mushroom ketchup was a common savoury lift of the period and does the job of Worcestershire sauce.
- Oven for the pastry versionThe recipe gives no temperature here. Half an hour will not brown puff paste in a moderate oven. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the layers, then drop to 375F for another 15 to 25 minutes depending on thickness. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking pastry only.
- Oven for the French versionA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 325-350F. Two hours at that temperature suits a four-pound roll; check the centre reaches 160F if you have used any raw meat in the mixture.
- The coarse paste is not foodThe flour-and-water crust, sometimes called huff paste, is a sealed jacket that steams the meat and is thrown away. Mix it stiff, roughly two parts flour to one of water by weight, and roll it about half an inch thick so it does not crack. The buttered paper underneath keeps it from sticking to the meat.
- Shaping the rollBind the mince with an egg and a handful of breadcrumbs before rolling it into a cylinder, or it will collapse when the crust comes off. Wrap the paper tightly and tie at intervals with string.
- YieldFour pounds of minced beef is a substantial dish for ten to twelve people. Halve everything for a household of four or five and cut the baking time for the pastry version by about a third.
- ServingBrown gravy is essential, not optional, given how dry the mince is. Make it from the roasting bones or from good beef stock reduced with a little browned flour and a spoonful of the meat's own jelly.
The real subject of this entry is the technique in the last sentence: baking meat inside a coarse flour-and-water crust so that it cooks in its own steam. That crust, often called huff paste or a huff crust, was one of the oldest ways of getting a moist result from a dry oven, and the same logic survives in salt-crust and clay-pot cooking today. The first half of the recipe is a different kind of thrift: a Victorian kitchen with a four-pound cold joint left from Sunday had to turn it into something presentable, and mincing it into puff pastry was one common answer alongside rissoles, croquettes and shepherd's pie. The confident attribution of the second method to "the French" is typical of English cookery books of the period, which tended to credit any careful, slightly laborious technique to French practice whether or not it was specifically French.