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Cannelon of Beef
2 lbs. lean beef, cut from round Grated rind 1/2 lemon 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon onion juice 2 tablespoons melted butter Few gratings nutmeg 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Chop meat finely, and add remaining ingredients in order given. Shape in a roll six inches long, place on rack in dripping-pan, and arrange over top slices fat salt pork and bake thirty minutes. Baste every five minutes with one-fourth cup butter melted in one cup boiling water. Serve with Brown Mushroom Sauce I.
A Victorian-era forcemeat roll of ground beef, closer to a fine-textured meatloaf than to anything stuffed. The recipe is short and workable; the main adjustments are oven temperature, which the original omits entirely, and doneness.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, which was normal when cooks judged by the fire. Bake at 400F: hot enough to brown the exterior in the half hour given, not hot enough to dry a two-pound roll.
- Chop, not grind fine"Chop meat finely" means hand-chopping or a pass through a meat chopper. Modern fine-ground beef packs dense, so a slightly coarser grind may keep the roll tender and give the seasonings somewhere to sit.
- DonenessThirty minutes will leave a six-inch roll pink at the centre. Ground beef should reach 160F internal; check with a thermometer rather than the clock, and expect 35-45 minutes depending on thickness.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavour without texture. Grate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or substitute a scant teaspoon of very finely grated onion.
- Fat salt porkThin slices of unsmoked cured pork fat, laid over the top to self-baste. Salt pork is still sold; sliced fatback, or unsmoked streaky bacon, does the same job.
- The basting liquidA quarter cup butter melted into a cup of boiling water, applied every five minutes, keeps the surface from hardening. It is worth doing at least three or four times.
- BindingOne egg for two pounds of meat is a light bind by modern standards and there is no breadcrumb. Shape the roll firmly and handle it on the rack with two spatulas, or it will crack.
- YieldServes four to six, sliced about three-quarters of an inch thick, with the mushroom sauce the original calls for.
Cannelon is generally connected to the French cannelon, a tube or rolled shape, and in Anglo-American cookery of the 1890s and 1900s the word was commonly applied to seasoned forcemeat shaped into a cylinder and roasted. It appears in domestic-science cookbooks of the period as a way to make round, a cheap and comparatively tough cut, respectable at a dinner table: chopping breaks the muscle down, and the lemon rind, nutmeg and parsley belong to an older tradition of aromatic forcemeats that predates the plain American meatloaf. The insistence on frequent basting with butter and water reflects kitchens without reliable thermostats, where a roast's surface would scorch long before the middle set.