Beef Cakes
Chop pieces of roast beef very fine. Mix up grated bread crumbs, chopped onions, and parsley; season with pepper and salt, moisten with a little dripping or catsup.
Cold ham or tongue may be added to improve it.
Make in broad, flat cakes, and spread a coat of mashed pota toes on the top and bottom of each. Lay a piece of butter on every cake and put it in an oven to brown.
Other cold meats may be prepared in the same way for a breakfast dish.--Mrs. D.
A leftovers dish from a period when a Sunday roast was expected to reappear at breakfast. The original assumes a cook who knows how much moisture a mince needs, so most of the judgment falls on the binding.
- The hinge: bind it properlyThere is no egg in the mixture, so the cake holds together only if the bread crumbs are fine and dry and the meat is chopped almost to a paste. Add the dripping or catsup a spoonful at a time until the mince just coheres when squeezed; wet mince will slump in the oven.
- "An oven to brown"The recipe gives no temperature. A hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F, suits the purpose: the filling is already cooked, so the only object is to crisp the potato coating and melt the butter through it. Fifteen to twenty minutes on a greased or parchment-lined sheet should be about right; go by colour rather than the clock.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs grated from a stale loaf, not the soft fresh crumbs a food processor makes and nothing like commercial dried crumbs. The recipe gives no proportions; add only enough crumb to help the mince cohere.
- DrippingThe rendered fat and jelly saved from roasting beef. Beef fat from the roasting pan is closest; melted butter or a spoonful of the roast's cold gravy will do the same work of carrying flavour and moisture.
- Catsup in 1879Household catsup of this period was usually mushroom, walnut or tomato, thin and sharply seasoned rather than sweet. Worcestershire sauce or a mushroom ketchup is nearer the mark than modern sweet tomato ketchup, which will make the cakes cloying.
- The potato coatingMashed potato must be stiff and cool to spread on a flat cake without sliding. Mash made with butter and very little milk, then chilled, is workable; leftover mash straight from the refrigerator is ideal.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; scale to the meat you have, making the cakes broad and flat as directed. Serve with the pan butter spooned over, and something sharp alongside, or a poached egg on top.
- Reheating cooked meatChop and assemble while the meat is properly cold from the refrigerator, and get the cakes into a hot oven promptly. Mince left standing at room temperature for an hour or two while the potatoes are made is the one real risk in the dish.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives — hence the closing "Mrs. D." — devotes considerable space to what to do with yesterday's roast, a preoccupation of any household cooking large joints without refrigeration. Beef cakes of this kind belong to the same broad family as the rissole, the croquette and the American hash cake: minced cold meat, a starchy binder and a hot oven or a skillet. The potato jacket top and bottom is the interesting touch, and it is essentially the same idea as the shepherd's pie crust reduced to individual portions, giving each cake a browned crust without the egg-and-crumb coating and deep fat that a French croquette would require. That it is offered as a breakfast dish is a reminder that the nineteenth-century Southern breakfast table was expected to carry hot meat, and that the cook was judged partly on how little went to waste.