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Scraped Beef Balls
Prepare scraped beef according to rule. Season; shape in round balls about the size of marbles; cook in hissing hot frying pan; keep pan constantly in motion, and cook. balls two minutes. Serve on small strips of toasted bread; garnish with parsley.
A chafing-dish trifle that depends entirely on the meat: scraped beef is raw beef pulp, and everything about the two-minute cooking assumes that texture. Substituting supermarket ground beef changes the dish.
- What "scraped beef" isThe rule referred to is the standard one: lay a thick slice of raw round or sirloin on a board and scrape the cut surface with the edge of a spoon or a dull knife, so the soft muscle comes away as pulp and the sinew and gristle stay behind on the board. The result is finer and looser than anything a grinder produces, which is why a marble-sized ball holds together at all.
- SeasoningThe recipe says only 'Season'; salt and pepper are the obvious reading. Season lightly and shape with a light hand; compressed pulp turns dense in the pan.
- The panThe recipe calls for a 'hissing hot frying pan'. Get a small heavy skillet properly hot before the meat goes in.
- DonenessScraped beef is comminuted meat, so it behaves like ground beef for food-safety purposes rather than like a steak. Two minutes in a hot pan may well leave the centres short of 160F; check one, and give larger balls longer.
- Keep the pan movingThe instruction is not decorative. Shaking rolls the balls so they brown on all sides and stay round; left still, they stick, flatten, and shed juice into the pan.
- Toast stripsCut crustless bread into fingers a little longer than the balls and toast them dry and firm. Soft toast collapses under the fat that runs out of the meat.
Scraping was the household answer to a problem that grinders only partly solved: how to get tender beef out of a tough cut without cooking it long. Through the nineteenth century scraped beef belonged mainly to the sickroom, where it was worked into beef tea, spread raw on bread for invalids, or lightly seared as here for people thought unable to manage a chop. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907 the technique had found its way to the table as ordinary fare, though how it made that passage is not something this recipe can settle. The book itself was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its savoury chapters like this one sit alongside the confectionery that was the firm's real interest.