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Beef and Sausages
1 lb. thinly cut beef 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 1 tablespoonful chopped parsozs.) flour Some bread stuffing ½ lb. sausages ley Salt and pepper Cut the meat into neat strips. Season the flour with salt and pepper; toss the meat in this, and fold each strip into neat rolls, placing a small portion of light bread crumb stuffing in each. Prick and divide
This is a version of beef olives — stuffed beef rolls — baked with sausages in an earthenware casserole. The transcription is garbled where the two ingredient columns of the original page ran together, and it breaks off mid-sentence, so the method has to be reconstructed from the parts that survive.
- The ingredient list, untangledReading across the two columns: 1 lb thinly cut beef, 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 oz) flour, some bread stuffing, 1½ lb sausages, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, salt and pepper.
- "Casserole" here means the potA casserole of this period is typically a lidded earthenware or fireproof china vessel that can go from the flame to the oven and then to the table; the surviving text itself says nothing about the pot. Any heavy lidded Dutch oven or covered braiser does the same work.
- What cut to buy"Thinly cut beef" for rolling means topside, round or flank sliced about 1/4 inch thick and beaten thinner between sheets of plastic. Ask for it cut for beef olives, braciole or rouladen.
- Securing the rollsThe surviving text says only to fold each strip into neat rolls; nothing about securing them survives, and in practice they rarely hold themselves. Tie each with kitchen string or fix with a toothpick. Browning them in a little dripping before any liquid goes in is a modern addition rather than something the text specifies — the flour coating gives the sauce its body.
- "Prick and divide" the sausagesThe sentence is cut off, but the sense is standard: prick the skins so they do not burst and cut each sausage in half, or twist and separate the links. Brown them with the beef rolls.
- Liquid and ovenNo cooking liquid or oven setting survives, and no stock appears among the ingredients at all. As a modern reconstruction: beef rolls of this size want enough stock or water to come halfway up, and a slow oven — around 300 to 325F — for about 2 hours, until the beef gives to a fork. The book gives no temperature of its own. A quick oven will tighten the meat before the connective tissue softens.
- Yield1 lb beef plus 1½ lb sausages feeds four to six generously, with potatoes to soak up the gravy.
Rolled and stuffed slices of beef appear in English cookery as "beef olives" by the eighteenth century, with earlier related dishes recorded under names such as "beef alows"; the name is often traced to the olive-like shape of the finished roll rather than to any olive in the dish, though the derivation is not settled. Books of this kind belong to the era when publishers issued small single-subject manuals promoting fireproof earthenware and flameproof china, and the selling point was economy — a covered pot on low heat turned cheap thin-cut beef and a pound and a half of sausages into a dish that needed no watching and came to the table in the vessel it cooked in, saving fuel, washing-up and a serving dish. The bread stuffing and the chopped parsley do the same job as the sausages: stretching a small quantity of meat across a large family.