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Beef Steak, Breaded
Procure a two-inch thick steak from the best part of the round; trim off all the fat, and put the steak into an earthen dish; put a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper in a vessel holding a pint, cover with two gills of olive oil, and fill the vessel to the brim with good vinegar. Pour this over the steak, cover the dish and let it remain two or three hours, turning the steak frequently. Put the trimmings of fat into a baking pan, and lay the steak over them. Moisten a few sifted bread-crumbs with a little hot milk, add butter, salt, pepper, a tea-spoonful of Worcestershire sauce, and some powdered sweet herbs. Mix this together with the yolk of an egg, and spread the mixture over the top of the meat. Place the pan in a hot oven and roast from twenty-five to thirty minutes. This steak may be served with a sauce or not. Probable cost, 2s.
A marinated, crumb-crusted roast of round — a way of making a lean, tough cut behave like a steak. Two things decide the outcome: the marinade must be long enough to matter, and the meat must come out of the oven before the crust burns.
- The measurementsA gill is a quarter of a pint (5 fl oz imperial; 4 fl oz in American measure), so two gills of olive oil fill half the pint vessel and topping it up leaves an equal quantity of vinegar — a 50/50 oil-and-vinegar marinade, sharp for a lean cut.
- Use a non-reactive dishThe "earthen dish" is doing real work: an hour in strong vinegar will pit aluminium and pick up a metallic taste. Glass, glazed earthenware, stainless or a zip-top bag.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. The crumb crust wants that heat to set and colour, but it will darken fast, so check at 20 minutes and tent loosely with foil if it is browning ahead of the meat.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty-five to thirty minutes at 450F will bring a 2-inch round to about medium-rare. Round has almost no fat to forgive you: pull it at 130-135F internal and it will be juicy, take it to 150F and it will be dry and grey. Rest 10 minutes before slicing.
- Slice it thin, across the grainThe recipe does not say so. Round is a hard-working muscle with long fibres; carve it in thin slices at right angles to the grain or it eats like rope.
- Sweet herbsThe period term for the mild kitchen herbs — thyme, marjoram, summer savory, parsley — as opposed to strong or bitter ones. A teaspoon of dried thyme and marjoram together is about right for this quantity.
- The bed of fat trimmingsLaying the steak on its own trimmed fat is a substitute for a rack: it lifts the meat off the pan, bastes the underside and stops it stewing in its juices. A wire rack over the pan does the same if the trimmings are meagre.
- Yield and costA 2-inch steak from the round would run somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 lb, enough for four to six. "Probable cost, 2s." is the standard costing note appended to entries in Cassell's — two shillings, a real if not extravagant outlay for a dish feeding a family.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a household cookbook was expected to make the cheap parts of the carcass presentable, and the round — lean, coarse-grained and cut from the hind leg — was the classic problem. The answer here is the old one: an acid marinade to loosen the fibres and a moistened crumb crust to hold in what juice remains. The Worcestershire sauce dates the recipe as much as anything else; by the second half of the nineteenth century Lea & Perrins' bottled sauce had become a standard British larder item and appears throughout books of this period as shorthand for savoury depth. The "probable cost" appended to each entry is a hallmark of Cassell's, which was written for middle-class households rather than for professional kitchens.