Home › Meat and Poultry Pies › Rolled Boiled Beef
Rolled Boiled Beef
Cut a piece of flank beef about 12 inches long, 6 wide, and 2 inches thick. Lay on a dish and cover with the following force-meat: 1 cupful of cracker or bread crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls of finely chopped pork; 1 saltspoonful each of marjoram, sage, and thyme; a few drops of onion juice, 1 teaspoonful of chopped onion, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 saltspoonful of pepper, and 1 egg. Add enough good stock to moisten it so that it can be spread on the meat. Roll the meat, spread with the force-meat, and tie it closely together; sew it up in cheesecloth, put it into a kettle of boiling water, and cook slowly for four hours. Let the beef lie in the water until it is cool, then place it under a heavy weight for twenty-four hours. Serve cold with horseradish sauce. Corned beef is good prepared in the same way.
A cold pressed beef roll of the kind that once lived in the larder for a week of cold suppers. The technique is sound; the only real change is where the pressing happens.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the herbs are 1/4 teaspoon each, and the pepper an eighth of a teaspoon.
- The cutA 12 x 6 x 2-inch piece of flank is a substantial slab; taken at face value it works out nearer 5 lb, though a trimmed, uneven flank piece will weigh less. Ask for flank steak butterflied, or a piece of skirt or thin brisket flap opened flat; the muscle must lie in one even sheet or it will not roll.
- Chopped porkThe recipe does not specify which pork; in a force-meat like this it is most likely fat salt pork or fat back, chopped fine, rather than sausage meat. Unsmoked pork belly works; if you use salt pork, cut the added salt back to a pinch.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a cloth. A few drops of the liquid from a microplaned onion does the same job.
- Cook slowlyThe water is brought to a boil, the roll goes in, and the heat then drops to a bare shiver; the recipe gives no temperature. A rolling boil for four hours will squeeze the force-meat out and shred the flank.
- CheeseclothTie the roll firmly with butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals first, then sew it into a double layer of cheesecloth. The cloth keeps the shape and stops the surface fraying over four hours.
- Cooling and pressingCool the roll in its liquid only until you can handle the pot, then chill both. Do the twenty-four-hour pressing in the refrigerator, weighted under a board and a couple of full cans; the original does not say where it was pressed, but it should not be left standing at room temperature for a day.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10 as a cold cut. Slice thin across the roll so each slice shows the spiral of force-meat, and keep the horseradish sauce sharp.
- With corned beefIf you follow the closing suggestion, soak the corned beef in cold water for an hour or two first and add no salt at all to the force-meat.
Pressed rolled beef belongs to the cold larder tradition that ran through nineteenth-century English and American housekeeping: a tough, cheap cut boned or flattened, stuffed, bound, simmered long, and then squeezed under a weight so that it set firm enough to carve thin. It is the plain domestic cousin of the French galantine, and it earned its place in a book like this because it did several jobs at once, using flank -- one of the least prized cuts -- turning a day's cooking into a week of cold suppers, and requiring no oven. The force-meat of crumbs, chopped pork, sage, marjoram and thyme is a familiar English stuffing mixture of the period, and the instruction to sew the roll into cheesecloth reflects a kitchen in which cooking cloths were ordinary equipment.