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Salt and Pepper (One pint of Brown Sauce)
One pint of Brown Sauce.
Cut the fillet of beef into pieces of half an inch thick and four inches long, and beat them out with a wet cutlet-bat. Chop up the trimmings of the beef, the suet, parsley, thyme, and marjoram, and mix them in a basin with the bread-crumbs, the grated lemon-rind, nutmeg, salt, pepper, and the egg; stuff each piece of beef with this mixture, roll it up, and tie it round with a piece of string. Place these stuffed rolls of beef in a stewpan with one pint of brown sauce, and stew gently for threequarters of an hour. For serving, take off the string, and dish up with mashed potato or spinach, with the sauce poured round.
This is a beef olive — stuffed, rolled and braised in brown sauce. The page as printed carries over only one quantity from the original ingredient list, so treat everything but the sauce as a matter of judgement.
- Missing quantitiesApart from the pint of brown sauce, no amounts are given here for suet, crumbs, herbs, lemon or egg. For six rolls, a stuffing of about 3 oz fresh breadcrumbs, 2 oz shredded suet, a tablespoon of mixed chopped parsley, thyme and marjoram, the grated rind of half a lemon and one egg to bind is in the right range.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2½ US cups. Brown sauce here means a made sauce of the period — stock thickened with brown roux and reduced, of the espagnole type — not the bottled condiment of the same name.
- Beating the beefThe bat is wetted so the meat does not stick and tear as it is struck. A rolling pin or heavy pan between two sheets of dampened parchment does the same. Beating to something like 1/8 inch will let the slices roll without splitting.
- Fillet is the wrong cut for 45 minutesFillet has very little connective tissue to convert to gelatine, so three-quarters of an hour of stewing tends to leave it grey and dry. Modern practice for beef olives uses topside, silverside or thin-cut braising steak, braised gently for 1½ to 2 hours until genuinely tender. If you keep to fillet, 20 minutes at a bare simmer is nearer the mark.
- TyingTie at both ends and once round the middle, or the stuffing works out into the sauce. Cotton kitchen string only; remove every piece before serving, as the recipe says.
- SuetShredded beef suet is still sold in packets in Britain and keeps the stuffing moist. Cold grated butter or finely chopped beef fat substitutes acceptably.
- Heat"Stew gently" means the surface barely trembling — around 180F/82C in the pan. The recipe uses a stewpan on the fire; a covered pot in a low oven will hold that steadily if your burner will not.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. Allow two rolls per person, served with mash or spinach.
Beef olives have nothing to do with olives: the name is generally traced to the older English alows or aloes, itself borrowed from French, and recipes for stuffed and rolled beef slices appear in English cookery books from the sixteenth century onward. The same dish travels under many names — paupiettes in France, oiseaux sans tête or "headless birds" in Belgium, involtini in Italy — and all of them share the logic of making a modest quantity of meat go further by wrapping it round a seasoned bread stuffing. What marks this version as high-class cookery is the choice of fillet, an extravagance where a thrifty household would have used skirt or topside, and the assumption that a pint of made brown sauce is simply standing ready in the kitchen.