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Cecils with Tomato Sauce
1 cup cold roast beef or rare steak finely chopped Salt Pepper Onion juice Worcestershire Sauce 2 tablespoons bread crumbs 1 tablespoon melted butter Yolk 1 egg slightly beaten Season beef with salt, pepper, onion juice, and Worcestershire Sauce; add remaining ingredients, shape after the form of small croquettes, pointed at ends. Roll in flour, egg, and crumbs, fry in deep fat, drain, and serve with Tomato Sauce.
A leftover-roast dish: chopped cooked beef bound with crumbs, butter and egg yolk, shaped, breaded and fried. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how finely the meat is chopped and how firm the mixture is before it hits the fat.
- Chop, do not grindRun the cold beef through a knife or pulse it briefly rather than putting it through a grinder or food processor to paste. You want distinct fine shreds; a smooth puree turns the interior pasty.
- Chill before shapingThe mixture is barely bound at all -- one yolk and a spoonful of butter for a cup of meat. Refrigerate it 30 minutes before forming, and again after breading, or the pointed croquettes will split in the fat.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, about a teaspoon. It gives the flavour without wet pieces that loosen the bind.
- Two eggs in playThe yolk in the ingredient list goes into the meat; the "egg" in the coating is a separate one. Beat a whole egg, diluted with a little water if you like, for dipping between the flour and crumbs.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "deep fat" and gives no number; fat hot enough to brown a bread cube briskly, in the region of 375F on a modern thermometer, suits this. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crust and warming the centre -- two to three minutes, turning once, is enough. Cooler fat soaks in; hotter browns the crumbs before the middle is warm.
- YieldA cup of chopped meat should give roughly six to eight small cecils, enough for two as a light main course or four as a first course; the recipe itself states no yield.
- The sauceNo tomato sauce recipe appears on this page; the capitalised "Tomato Sauce" points to one elsewhere in the book. Failing that, use any plain cooked tomato sauce, thin rather than thick, spooned onto the plate so the crust stays crisp.
- Reheated meatUse roast beef that has been refrigerated promptly and is no more than two or three days old, and serve the cecils as soon as they are fried rather than holding them warm.