Roast Beef
Pieces used for roasting are sirloin, rib, back of the rump, face of the rump and upper round.
Eight to ten minutes a pound should be allowed for cooking the meat moderately rare.
Wipe the meat; place on rack in dripping pan; dredge meat and pan well with flour, then sprinkle well with salt and pepper.
Cook in hot oven for fifteen minutes, until flour is well browned. Reduce heat and continue roasting, basting every ten minutes until cooked.
Baste with fat tried out from the meat. If that is not sufficient, add beef suet, beef drippings, or butter. Avoid the use of water in the pan, as by its use the meat is steamed rather than roasted.
Serve with brown gravy, made by browning four tablespoons of fat from the pan, adding four tablespoons flour. When brown, add one and one half cups water or beef stock. 2 cups milk 2 cups flour
A straightforward high-heat-then-moderate roast, written before thermometers were standard equipment. The method still works; the timings need checking against an instant-read probe.
- The stray line at the end"2 cups milk 2 cups flour" is a fragment of a neighbouring recipe on the page, possibly a Yorkshire pudding or popover batter, and has nothing to do with the roast. Ignore it.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no figures, only "hot oven" and "reduce heat." In modern terms treat the first fifteen minutes as a hot oven, roughly 450F, and reduce to around 325F for the remainder once the flour has browned.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockEight to ten minutes a pound is only a rough guide and assumes a large, well-shaped roast; a thin rib or a small round will overshoot badly. Pull at 120-125F in the centre for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, and rest 15-20 minutes before carving.
- The cuts"Back of the rump" and "face of the rump" are butcher's terms for sections of the beef rump now sold in various forms as rump roast or top sirloin; "upper round" is top round. These are lean and unforgiving — they want rare and thin slicing. Sirloin and rib remain the reliable choices.
- The flour dredgeFlouring the meat and the pan is not seasoning, it is gravy-making: the flour toasts in the fat during the first fifteen minutes so the pan drippings have colour and body before the gravy flour goes in. It does prevent a really dry-crusted exterior, so skip it if you want a hard sear and thicken the gravy at the end instead.
- BastingEvery ten minutes is more than the meat needs, and each opening drops the oven temperature. Two or three bastings over the whole roast is plenty; the fat sits on the surface and does little for interior moisture.
- Beef suet and drippingsBoth are still sold by butchers, though rendered beef fat is no longer a pantry staple. Butter works but browns fast in the initial hot oven — hold it until after the heat is reduced.
- The gravyFour tablespoons fat to four tablespoons flour and one and a half cups liquid gives a fairly thick gravy, about a cup and a half. Pour off all but the measured fat, scrape the browned flour and drippings loose, and let the roux cook a minute before the liquid goes in. Stock gives far better results than water.
- YieldAllow about 12 oz of bone-in rib or 8 oz of boneless roast per person; a 5 lb roast serves six to eight.
The insistence on keeping water out of the pan is the whole argument of nineteenth-century roasting literature in one line. True roasting meant meat turning on a spit before an open fire, with a dripping pan below; when the closed range replaced the hearth, cooks and cookbook writers spent decades warning that an oven full of steam produced something closer to a pot roast. Dredging with flour was one of the old spit-roasting habits carried indoors — it gave the surface colour that the direct radiant heat of a fire used to supply. Lowney's, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm and best known for its confectionery and cake chapters, still carried a full meat section because a general cook book was expected to cover a whole household; the roast beef entry is the standard American treatment of its day, and the pudding batter whose ingredients have strayed onto the end of the page is its usual companion.