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Rib Roast of Beef
Get, from the butcher, a rib-roast--the second cut is best--and get him to take out the bones, and roll and skewer it: if this is not convenient, it can be done at home with a sharp knife. Before roasting, take out the wooden skewers put in at market, unroll, season well with salt and pepper and anything else liked, and roll again tightly, fastening securely with the iron skewer pins. Put it in a pan on a little iron griddle or trivet, made for the purpose to keep it just over the pint of water in the pan. Pepper and salt freely, dredge with flour and baste. Some persons like half a teacup of pepper vinegar, poured over just before it is done; and minced onion, thyme and parsley added to the gravy, which should be brown.--Mrs. B.
A rolled boneless rib roast with a wet pan and a flour dredge — a nineteenth-century method that sits halfway between spit-roasting and modern oven roasting. A few decisions the original leaves to your judgment are worth settling before the meat goes in.
- The cut"The second cut" is a butcher's term for one portion of the rib section; usage varied, so confirm with your butcher what he means by it. Boned, rolled and tied, such a roast will typically run 4-6 lb; ask for it tied with butcher's twine rather than skewers.
- Skewers and twineThe "iron skewer pins" are trussing skewers, and the wooden ones the butcher used were meant only to hold the roll for transport. Kitchen twine at 1-inch intervals does the job better and comes off cleanly.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A workable modern approach: sear at 450F for 20 minutes, then drop to 325F for the remainder — about 15 minutes per pound for rare-to-medium-rare, though timing varies with the thickness of the roll.
- The pint of waterThis is the hinge. The water and trivet keep drippings from scorching and give you gravy, but a pan of steaming liquid will soften any crust. Use it, keep it topped up so it never dries, and accept that this is a gravy-forward roast rather than a dry-crusted one.
- Dredging with flourFlour on the wet, seasoned surface browns into a thin savory shell and thickens the pan liquid as it drips. Dredge lightly — a heavy coat sloughs off during basting.
- DonenessJudge by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part, not by time: 125F for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare. Start checking early.
- RestingThe original says nothing about it. Rest the roast 20 minutes under loose foil before removing the twine and carving, or the juices will end up on the board.
- Pepper vinegarA Southern pantry staple: hot peppers steeped in vinegar, still sold as pepper sauce. Half a teacup is roughly 2-3 fl oz by nineteenth-century measure — enough to sharpen the gravy noticeably, so add it in stages and taste.
- YieldFigure about 1/2 lb per person on a boneless roast; a 5 lb rolled rib serves eight or so with gravy.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries close with an initial like "Mrs. B." rather than a full name — the book reads as a collective household archive rather than one cook's voice. The method here catches a transition: spit-roasting before an open fire was giving way to closed cast-iron ranges, and cooks carried over the habits of the hearth — constant basting, a trivet to lift the meat clear, liquid in the dripping pan — into an oven where they were no longer strictly necessary. The instruction to have the butcher bone and roll the ribs reflects an era when meat was bought whole and prepared to order daily; the pepper vinegar finish, and the thyme, parsley and onion stirred into a brown gravy, are the recognizably Virginian part of an otherwise English roast.