Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef, Sirloin of, Roast
Beef, Sirloin of, Roast
Choose a middle sirloin of eight or nine pounds weight, with as much undercut as possible. Roast it before a clear fire or in a well-ventilated oven. Cook it quickly for the first fifteen minutes to harden the surface and keep in the juices, then move it further away, or slacken the fire if you put the joint in the oven, and cook slowly. Baste continually. Strain off the dripping, put a little salt in the bottom of the pan, and pour a quarter of a pint of boiling water on it. Strain this round the meat, garnish with scraped horse-radish, and serve with horse-radish sauce and Yorkshire pudding. Time, quarter of an hour to each pound. Price of sirloin, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
A late-Victorian roast that works well in a modern oven, provided you translate the two-stage fire into two oven temperatures and ignore the timing table in favour of a thermometer.
- What "sirloin" means hereThis is the British cut: the whole loin on the bone, with the fillet (the "undercut") still attached beneath. It is not an American sirloin steak. Ask a butcher for a bone-in beef loin roast, or substitute a 4-5 lb boneless rib or striploin roast and shorten the cooking accordingly.
- The two temperatures"Cook it quickly" then "cook slowly" can be read in a modern oven as about 15 minutes at a high heat, say 450F, then reduced to around 325F for the remainder; the book itself gives no temperatures, only a fire to be slackened. The initial blast browns the surface; the claim that it seals in juices is not true, but the flavour it builds is reason enough to keep it.
- Ignore the quarter-hour per poundFifteen minutes per pound on an eight-pound joint gives two hours, which at a moderate oven will likely carry the joint past rare. Roast to internal temperature instead: 120-125F for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, taken in the thickest part away from bone. Timing on a large bone-in loin varies widely, so start checking well before the two hours are up.
- RestingThe book says nothing about it. Rest a joint this size 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving; the temperature will climb another 5-10F as it stands.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. Poured onto the salted, deglazed pan it makes a thin brown gravy in the old style, not a thickened one.
- Basting and the drippingContinual basting is unnecessary in a closed oven and costs you heat every time the door opens; two or three times is plenty. Reserve the strained dripping, which is the correct fat for the Yorkshire pudding served alongside.
- Horse-radishScraped fresh horseradish root, not the creamed jarred sauce, is what the garnish means. Grate it shortly before serving and keep it away from heat, since its pungency is volatile and fades quickly.
- YieldEight or nine pounds on the bone serves 10-12 generously, with cold beef left for the following day, which was the whole point of a joint this size.
Cassell's gives roast sirloin as its own entry; in a Victorian household it was a benchmark against which a cook was judged: a clear fire, a well-ventilated oven, and a joint neither scorched nor grey. The name comes through Old French, sur longe, meaning above the loin; the popular tale of an English king knighting a loin of beef as "Sir Loin" is folk etymology, invented after the fact. The pairing with Yorkshire pudding is older than the oven-baked version most people know, since the batter was originally set in a dish beneath a spit-roasted joint to catch the falling dripping. The quoted price of 10d. to 1s. a pound is a useful reminder of scale: at those rates an eight-pound sirloin came to something like 7s., a substantial share of a working family's weekly food spending, and belonged to the sort of house that expected cold beef on the sideboard for several days after.