Home › The Principles of Cookery › BEEF, SIRLOIN OF, ROAST (a la St. Florentin)
BEEF, SIRLOIN OF, ROAST (a la St. Florentin)
Take out the suet and lay it thickly over the top of the fillet, secured down with a well-buttered paper. First tie the flap under the fillet, and make all firm before it is put to the spit. About ten minutes before it is done take off the paper, dredge the meat lightly with salt and dry flour, and baste it with butter. Serve with Robert sauce in a tureen. Probable cost of beef, 1s. per pound.
A spit-roasting method written for an open fire, with the joint's own suet used as barding. It translates to an oven roast without much trouble, provided you know what the Victorian butcher was handing over.
- What the cut isA full sirloin on the bone, with the fillet (the tenderloin) still attached beneath and the thin flap of flank meat still on. Modern butchers usually break this down into separate roasts, so ask specifically for a bone-in sirloin with the fillet left in place, or accept a boned and rolled sirloin and skip the tying instructions.
- The suetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, and the whole point here is that it melts slowly and self-bastes the lean fillet, which would otherwise dry out before the outer muscle is done. Butchers will still sell it; if you cannot get it, a thick sheet of back fat or several rashers of unsmoked fatty bacon does the same job.
- The buttered paperThis is the period's foil: a sheet of paper rubbed with butter, tied over the fat to hold it down and shield the meat from direct radiant heat. Ordinary parchment tied with butcher's twine behaves the same way in an oven.
- Spit to ovenFor a spit-roast in front of a fire, read a hot oven. A workable modern equivalent is about 450F for the first 20 minutes to set the outside, then 325F for the remainder; bone-in sirloin may run somewhere around 15 to 20 minutes per pound at that lower heat for rare to medium-rare, but the recipe itself gives no heat or timing at all.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockThe original assumes a cook standing over the fire all afternoon. Pull the joint at 125-130F in the thickest part for rare, 135F for medium-rare, and let it rest 20 to 30 minutes; carryover adds several degrees. The fillet underneath cooks faster than the sirloin muscle above it.
- The last ten minutesRemoving the paper, dredging with salt and dry flour, and basting with butter is a browning trick, not a thickening one. The flour catches the fat and crisps into a thin savoury crust. Do it at high heat, uncovered, and watch it, since flour scorches quickly.
- Robert sauceA classic brown sauce of onions sweated in butter, deglazed with white wine and vinegar, built on a meat gravy or demi-glace and finished with Dijon mustard off the heat. The mustard must not boil or it turns bitter. Serve it separately in a warmed jug, as directed, rather than over the meat.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A joint of this kind, on the bone with the fillet still in place, is a large roast and will serve a table of eight or more, with the fillet as the prized portion.
Cassell's, like other English kitchen books of the period, dressed familiar joints in French names for the dinner-party table; the recipe itself does not explain what a la St. Florentin denoted. What is genuinely old here is the sauce: Robert is one of the small handful of brown sauces with a long documented lineage in French cookery, and Rabelais name-checks it in the sixteenth century. The quoted price, a shilling a pound, marks this out as one of the costlier joints. The often-repeated tale that the cut was knighted "Sir Loin" by an English king is folk etymology; the word comes from the Old French surlonge, above the loin.