Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rolled Beef
Rolled Beef
To make a pickle, pound the following ingredients to powder. Six pounds of common salt, two ounces of saltpetre, eight ounces of moist sugar, a table-spoonful of chopped herbs--consisting of thyme, basil, marjoram, savory, and bay-leaves--a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, half an ounce of cloves, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of peppercorns, and a clove of garlic. The latter may be omitted. Take a square piece of the thin end of the flank of beef, weighing from eight to twelve pounds. Bone and skin it, rub it well in every part with the powder, and turn and rub it every day for three days. Wash and wipe it dry, and spread upon the inside a layer of good veal forcemeat. Roll the beef up firmly and evenly, bind it tightly, tie it in a cloth, and put it into a saucepan with as much boiling water as will cover it, adding also a carrot, an onion stuck with two cloves, a bunch of sweet herbs, a blade of mace, and a few sticks of celery. Let the liquor boil for one minute, skim it, draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and let its contents simmer gently till the beef is done enough. Le it remain in the liquor until it is partially cooled, take it up without untying the string, put it between two dishes, place a weight upon it, and let it stand till cold. Before serving, brush it over with two coats of liquid glaze, and garnish with parsley. If it is wished that the beef should be served warm, take it when it has been pressed and is almost cold, and warm it again in a little of the liquor in which it was boiled. Skim this carefully, boil it up with a spoonful of brown thickening, stir into it a glass of sherry and any seasoning that may be required, and pour it round the beef. Garnish the dish with glazed carrots. Instead of rubbing the beef with the savoury-powder, it may, if preferred, be prepared for boiling as follows. Bone and skin the beef, and rub into it every day for a week salt mixed with a fourth of its weight in sugar. Wash and dry the meat, lay it on the table, and strew over the inside a savoury-powder made by mixing together a dozen pounded cloves, half a nutmeg, grated, a quarter of an ounce of mace, a pinch of cayenne, two large table-spoonfuls of finely-chopped parsley, and a table-spoonful of chopped herbs, consisting of thyme, marjoram, bay-leaves, and basil. Roll the meat in the form of a bolster, bind it tightly, and tie it in a cloth as before. The easiest way of glazing the beef when it is to be served cold, is to procure a quarter of a pound of glaze from the grocer's, dissolve it by putting it, in a jar, into boiling water, and when it is melted brush it over the meat. Time to simmer the beef after it has once boiled, half an hour per pound. Sufficient for a handsome and excellent dish. Probable cost, flank of beef, 9d. per pound.
This is a cured, stuffed and pressed joint from the era when a cool larder was the only refrigeration a household had. The cooking is straightforward; the curing stage is the problem.
- Why the cure fails modern practiceEight to twelve pounds of boned flank is rubbed with a dry mix and turned daily for three days (or a week in the second method) at unstated temperature. Nothing here controls the two variables that matter in curing meat — the temperature the meat sits at and the amount of curing salt actually absorbed into it. A thick rolled joint held in the danger zone while a surface rub slowly penetrates is exactly the situation modern curing protocols are written to prevent.
- The saltpetreTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is dispersed through six pounds of salt and rubbed on by hand, so the dose reaching the meat is unknowable. Contemporary curing uses pre-blended nitrite cures at a fixed percentage of the meat's weight precisely because nitrate and nitrite are effective in a narrow range and harmful above it. Straight saltpetre is not a domestic ingredient any more, and there is no way to scale this rub into a measured cure. If you want a cured rolled joint, work from a current recipe with weights, percentages and temperatures.
- Veal forcemeat inside a rolled jointA raw stuffing sealed into the centre of a ten-pound roll takes a long time to reach a safe internal temperature, and the recipe's guide of half an hour per pound of simmering is a clock instruction rather than a temperature one. Rolled and stuffed meats are the classic case for a probe thermometer, not a timetable.
- Flank of beefThe Victorian "thin end of the flank" is the coarse-grained belly cut sold in the UK as thin flank; the American flank steak comes from roughly the same region but is a far smaller piece. A modern butcher is unlikely to have it as an eight to twelve pound square with the skin still on; that piece assumed a whole-carcass butchery that no longer exists at retail.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar with the molasses still in it — light brown sugar is the nearest thing on a modern shelf, muscovado if you want the darker, wetter version the name implies.
- Glaze from the grocer'sGlaze is meat stock reduced to a firm brown jelly, sold by the quarter pound and melted in a jar set in boiling water. The modern equivalent is glace de viande, either bought as a concentrate or made by reducing good stock until it coats a spoon and sets solid when cold.
- Brown thickeningFor the hot version, "brown thickening" is the period standing preparation of flour cooked with butter until nut-brown, in effect a dark roux, whisked into the skimmed cooking liquor to make the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number, only "Sufficient for a handsome and excellent dish"; a pressed joint of eight to twelve pounds, sliced thin, plainly goes well beyond one sitting.
Collared and rolled beef of this kind was a staple of the English cold table for well over two centuries before this book -- a cheap, coarse cut boned, spiced, rolled into a bolster, boiled, pressed under a weight and sliced thin to show the spiral of forcemeat. The point of it was economy dressed up as ceremony: flank is quoted here at ninepence a pound, well below the price of a prime roasting joint, and the curing rub, the forcemeat and the coat of glaze turn a tough belly cut into something that could be carried to table on a garnished dish. Saltpetre appears in the pickle for the reason it always did, to keep the meat red rather than the dull grey that boiled salt beef otherwise turns, an effect cooks understood empirically long before nitrate chemistry was described. The bay, basil, marjoram, savory and thyme mixture belongs to the same tradition of "sweet herbs" that runs through English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, and the instruction to buy the glaze ready-made from the grocer points to a period in which convenience products were beginning to reach middle-class kitchens that no longer kept a stockpot going all day.