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Beef Steak, Roasted, and Stuffed
Fry in a little butter the following ingredients, and make a forcemeat of them and two French rolls, which have been previously soaked in milk; see that the frying-pan is quite clean, and put into it one ounce of butter, a slice of lean ham, finely minced, a bay-leaf, a little minced parsley, two shallots, a clove, two blades of mace, and a few mushrooms. Put the rolls into a stewpan after having squeezed out all the milk, and add to them three or four table-spoonfuls of rich stock; then put half a pint of stock to the ingredients in the frying-pan, boil for twenty minutes, and strain the liquid on to the rolls in the stewpan, place it over the fire and stir in a little butter; when dry keep still stirring; then add the yolks of two eggs to bind it. Have ready two pounds of rump steak, cut thick, season it with pepper and salt, and roll it up tight with the above forcemeat carefully enclosed, that it may not drop out. Roast it for one hour and a half before a good, clear fire, basting constantly with butter, and serve with brown gravy. Probable cost, 2s. 10d. Sufficient for four persons.
This is a rolled and stuffed steak roast: a rich bread-and-ham forcemeat sealed inside a thick slab of rump, cooked on a spit before an open fire. The forcemeat is the whole point, and it needs to be dry and stiff before it goes in.
- Dry the forcemeat properlyThe instruction to keep stirring "when dry" is the hinge. The soaked rolls must be worked over the heat until the paste pulls away from the pan in a mass before the egg yolks go in; a wet forcemeat will weep and force its way out of the roll as the meat contracts.
- French rollsSoft white yeast rolls with a thin crust, not baguette. Two of them give a few ounces of crumb, depending on the size of the roll. Crustless white sandwich bread is the nearest modern stand-in.
- Half a pint of stockImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. The three or four tablespoons added directly to the rolls are on top of that.
- Blades of maceMace is the dried outer casing of the nutmeg. Two blades come to something on the order of a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though blades vary a good deal in size. They are strained out with the rest of the aromatics, so ground mace tied in a scrap of muslin behaves the same way.
- Rolling and tyingHave the butcher cut and butterfly a 2 lb piece of rump so it opens flat to about half an inch. Spread the forcemeat short of the edges, roll with the grain running the length of the roll, and tie at 1 inch intervals with butcher's twine.
- Roasting without a spit"Before a good, clear fire" means open-fire roasting with a dripping pan beneath, whether on a spit or a jack. In an oven, use 350F on a rack over a shallow pan, basting with butter every 15 minutes. A 2 lb roll will likely be cooked through before the stated hour and a half; check that the centre of the stuffing has reached 165F rather than trusting the clock.
- Expect it well doneRump is a lean, firm cut and this treatment gives a sliceable, fully cooked roll rather than anything pink. That is what the period intended, and the constant butter basting plus the brown gravy are there to compensate for it.
- Yield and costFour servings, as stated. The "probable cost, 2s. 10d." is Cassell's standard price note and is of no practical use beyond showing this as a middling, not extravagant, dinner.
Cassell's belongs to the era when the roasting of joints before an open fire was still treated as the benchmark of English cookery, even as closed ranges were replacing it in ordinary kitchens; the instruction to baste constantly before "a good, clear fire" is a survival of spit-roasting technique in a book otherwise full of stewpans and ovens. The dish itself is a beef version of the stuffed-and-rolled meats found across nineteenth-century European cooking, and its forcemeat follows the classic French method: bread soaked in milk, enriched with a strained aromatic stock and bound with egg yolk, essentially a savoury panade. Ham, shallot, bay, clove, mace and mushroom make up a familiar Victorian flavouring combination for meat forcemeats.