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Rolled Beefsteak
Beat a large tender steak thoroughly and carefully.
Sprinkle over salt, pepper, sage, minced onion, minced parsley, and bits of butter.
Have ready some mealy Irish potatoes mashed fine, and seasoned with a little butter and salt. Spread over all, and roll up tightly : fasten the ends and sides securely with skewer pins. Place in a pan with such broth or gravy as may be on hand; if none, two teacups of boiling water, and one small minced onion, pepper, salt, and one slice of pork.
Simmer and baste as you would a roast duck. Sift over it browned cracker, pounded fine. Very nice.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a braised beef roulade — what a German cook would call a Rouladen — with mashed potato standing in for breadcrumb stuffing. The original assumes you know how a roast duck is handled, and gives no times at all.
- The cut"A large tender steak" beaten thoroughly means a flat, lean cut pounded to about 1/4 inch: top round, flank or bottom round all work. A tender steak in the modern sense (rib, strip) is wasted here, since the dish is braised for well over an hour.
- Irish potatoesSimply ordinary white potatoes, distinguished in Virginia cookbooks from sweet potatoes, which were often what was meant by "potato" in Southern cooking. Use a mealy variety — russet — and mash them stiff. Wet mash will leak out of the roll.
- Skewer pinsSmall metal poultry skewers. Butcher's twine tied at intervals holds a roulade better and does not fight you when you slice it; if you use skewers, count them so none goes to the table.
- A slice of porkSalt pork or fatback, added for fat and seasoning rather than as meat. A couple of ounces of bacon does the same job; the recipe does not say whether the pork was smoked, and in a Virginia kitchen it may well have been.
- TeacupsA period teacup runs somewhere between 3/4 cup and a full cup; two of them means roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of liquid. Either way the point is a shallow braise — the liquid should come a third of the way up the roll, not cover it.
- Simmer and baste as you would a roast duckA slow braise with regular basting. The recipe gives no times, no temperature, and does not say whether the pan is covered. Allow a couple of hours at a bare simmer, until a skewer meets no resistance. Rushing it at a boil will squeeze the meat tight around the stuffing.
- Browned cracker, pounded finePlain soda or water crackers toasted in the oven until tan, then crushed to crumbs. Sifted over at the end they give a dry, faintly nutty crust; they will soften within minutes, so do it at the table's edge.
- Resting and slicingLet the roll sit ten minutes off the heat before cutting the strings, or the potato center slumps. Cut crosswise into 3/4-inch rounds. A large steak treated this way serves four, with the pan liquid reduced and poured over.
Rolled and stuffed beef appears across nineteenth-century American cookbooks under names like beef roll, mock duck and olive of beef, all descendants of the older European practice of wrapping a thin slice of meat around a forcemeat. The instruction to baste it "as you would a roast duck" is a small window into how these books worked: Housekeeping in Old Virginia (compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879 from contributions by named Virginia housewives, here "Mrs. S. T.") assumed a reader who had already mastered a repertoire and needed only the variation, not the method. The potato filling is the frugal note — it stretches one steak to feed a family, and it uses up mashed potatoes already on hand, as the recipe likewise uses up "such broth or gravy as may be." Browned cracker crumbs as a finishing garnish were common in the same period.