“In a squalid road which she had often to cross there was a butcher's shop, where great sides of good red beef with yellow fat were hung in the doorway. Coming home one evening after dark, she noticed in front of her a gaunt little girl who carried a baby on her arm and was dragging a small child along by the hand. When they came to the butcher's shop, they stopped to look up at the great sides of beef, and the younger child stole up to one of them, laid her little hand upon it caressingly, then kissed it. The butcher came out and ordered them off, and Beth pursued her way through the mire with tears in her eyes. She had suffered temptation herself that same evening. She had to pass an Italian eating-house where she used to go sometimes, before she had any one depending on her, to have a two-shilling dinner--a good meal, decently served. Now, when she was always hungry, this was one of the places she had to hurry past; but even when she did not look at it, she thought about it, and was tormented by the desire to go in and eat enough just for once. Visions of thick soup, and fried fish with potatoes, and roast beef with salad, whetted an appetite that needed no whetting, and made her suffer an ache of craving scarcely to be controlled. That day had been a particularly hungry one. The coffee was done, every precious tea-leaf she had to husband for Arthur, and the butter had also to be carefully economised because a good deal was required for his crisp toast, which was unpalatable without it. Beth lived principally on the crusts she cut off the toast. When they were very stale, she steeped them in hot water, and sweetened them with brown sugar. This mess reminded her of Aunt Victoria's bread-puddings, and the happy summer when they lived together, and she learnt to sit upright on Chippendale chairs. She would like to have talked to Arthur of those tender memories, but she could not trust herself, being weak; the tears were too near the surface.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
The cheapest pieces of beef, suitable for baking or roasting, consist of the thick part of the ribs, cut from towards the shoulder, the mouse buttock and gravy pieces, and also what is commonly called the chuck of beef, which consists of the throat boned and tied up with string in the form of a small round. Whichever piece of beef you may happen to buy, it should be well sprinkled over with pepper, salt, and flour, and placed upon a small iron trivet in a baking dish containing peeled potatoes and about half-a-pint of water, and either baked in your own oven or else sent to the baker's. If you bake your meat in your own oven, remember that it must be turned over on the trivet every twenty minutes, and that you must be careful to baste it all over now and then with the fat which runs from it into the dish, using a spoon for that purpose.
Sources: The passage is from Sarah Grand, The Beth Book: Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Francatelli, A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes of 1852, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — navy cloth, teapot stamp.