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Beef Skirts
These should be broiled--they are best so--but if liked may be stewed in a little brown gravy seasoned with a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and another of shallot vinegar, with a thickening of butter and flour. If broiled, serve over spinach, or toasts fried and seasoned with pepper and salt. Time to broil, eight to ten minutes. Probable cost, 10d. to 1s. per pound.
A brief entry rather than a full recipe, but it gives a method, a time and a price. Two things need translating: the cut and the word "broil".
- "Broiled" means grilledIn Victorian English broiling is cooking over direct heat — a gridiron above coals, or under a modern grill/broiler element, or on a ridged pan. It is not pan-frying in fat.
- What beef skirt isThe diaphragm and surrounding muscles: what a butcher today sells as skirt, flank skirt or (the thick inner piece) onglet/hanger. Coarse-grained, strongly flavoured, and cheap because it is small and awkward to trim. Ask for the membrane pulled off.
- Eight to ten minutes is for a thick pieceTrimmed modern skirt is often only 1–2 cm thick and will be done in three to four minutes a side over high heat. Skirt is at its best pink in the middle; taken past medium it turns dry and stringy rather than tender.
- Slice across the grainThe single instruction that decides whether this dish is pleasant. The muscle fibres run the length of the piece and are long and tough; cut in thin slices at right angles to them, on a slight bias, after a few minutes' rest.
- Mushroom ketchup and shallot vinegarMushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, still sold by a few British makers; a dash of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy is the nearest common substitute. Shallot vinegar is simply vinegar in which sliced shallots have steeped for a week or two.
- "A thickening of butter and flour"Equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste (beurre manié), whisked into the simmering gravy in small pieces at the end. Roughly 15 g of each will thicken 300 ml of gravy.
- The stewing option needs longer than you would thinkIf you take the second route rather than grilling, skirt will not be tender in a few minutes — it wants an hour or more at a bare simmer to break down, and the gravy and thickening should go in at the end.
- The price10d. to 1s. a pound is the book's own market note from late-Victorian Britain, quoted to show where the cut stood: cheap, but not the cheapest. It is of no use as a modern guide.
- YieldAllow 150–200 g of trimmed skirt per person. A pound serves two generously with the spinach or fried toasts.
Skirt is a butcher's cut in the old sense — the sort of thing sold locally, quickly, and cheaply, and yielding little per animal. Cassell's, a dictionary-style household reference issued in parts and then as a fat single volume in the 1870s and 1880s, is full of these short entries: a cut of meat, the best treatment for it, an alternative if the cook prefers, and a price per pound. Serving grilled beef over spinach or on seasoned fried bread is a thoroughly nineteenth-century economy, the toast catching juices that would otherwise be lost. Neighbouring cuts have since been rediscovered — onglet in French bistro cooking, and the thin skirt that was the original meat of Tex-Mex fajitas — both traditions arriving, like this entry, at fast cooking over fierce heat and slicing thin across the grain.