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Beef, Miniature Round of
INGREDIENTS. From 5 to 10 lbs. of ribs of beef, sufficient brine to cover the meat.
AVERAGE COST, 10d. per lb.
Choose a fine rib, have the bone removed, rub some salt over the inside, and skewer the meat up into a nice round form, and bind it with tape. Put it into sufficient brine to cover it (see BEEF PICKLE), and let it remain for 6 days, turning the meat every day. When required to be dressed, drain from the pickle, and put the meat into very hot water; boil it rapidly for a few minutes, then draw the pot to the side of the fire, and simmer the beef very gently until done. Remove the skewer, and replace it by a plated or silver one.
Carrots and turnips should be served with this dish, and may be boiled with the meat.
TIME. A small round of 8 lbs., about 2 hours after the water boils; one of 12 lbs. about 3 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time. (An excellent Dish for a small Family.) Note. Should the joint be very small, 4 or 5 days will be sufficient time to salt it.
Beef. Miroton of. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS for small dish.- A few slices of cold roast beef, 2 oz. of butter, salt and pepper to taste, 3 onions, 1/2 pint of gravy. AVERAGE Cost, exclusive of the meat, 5d.
Slice the onions and put them into the frying-pan with the cold beef and butter; place it over the fire, and keep turning and stirring the ingredients to prevent them burning. When a pale brown, add the gravy and seasoning; let it simmer for a few minutes, and serve very hot. The dish is excellent and economical.
TIME.-5 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
BEEF OLIVES.
Beef Olives. INGREDIENTS for small dish.-1 lb. of rump-steak, 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful of minced savoury herbs, pepper and salt to taste, 1 pint of stock, 2 or 3 slices of bacon, 2 tablespoonfuls of any kind of store sauce, a slight thickening of butter and flour. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Have the steaks cut very thin, beat them to make them level, cut them into 6 or 7 pieces, brush over with egg, and sprinkle with herbs, which should be very finely minced; season with pepper and salt, roll up the pieces tightly, and fasten with a small skewer. Put the stock in a stewpan that will exactly hold the ingredients, for, by being pressed together they will keep their shape better; lay in the rolls of meat, cover them with the bacon, cut in thin slices, and over that put a piece of paper.
Stew them very gently for full 2 hours; for the slower they are done the better. Take them out, remove the skewers, thicken the gravy with butter and flour, and flavour with any store sauce that may be preferred.
Give one boil, pour over the meat, and serve.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Beef Olives (Economical). (Cold Meat Cookery.)---INGREDIENTS. The remains of underdone cold roast beef, bread crumbs, 1 shalot finely minced, pepper and salt to taste, gravy made from the beef bones, thickening of butter and flour, 1 tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup. Cut some slices of underdone roast beef about of an inch thick; sprinkle over them some bread-crumbs, minced shalot, and a little of the fat and seasoning; roll them, and fasten with a small skewer.
Have ready some gravy made from the beef bones; put in the pieces of meat, and stew them till tender, which will be about 11 hour, or rather longer. Arrange the meat in a dish, thicken and flavour the gravy, and pour it over the meat, when it is ready to serve.
TIME.-1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a wet-cured ("pickled") boned rib joint, boiled and served with root vegetables. The cure itself is not on this page — it is handed off to a separate Beef Pickle entry — and that omission is the reason the instructions cannot be followed safely as they stand.
- The cure has no quantities"Sufficient brine to cover the meat" tells you nothing about salt concentration, and a wet cure is only safe when the salt is measured against the weight of meat and water. Six days in an under-strength brine is six days of spoilage organisms multiplying in the centre of a rolled joint.
- Victorian beef pickle contained saltpetreThe brine this entry points to would have been salt, sugar or treacle and saltpetre (potassium nitrate). Because that recipe is not reproduced here, the reader working from this page alone has no figure for it at all, and curing nitrate and nitrite are now restricted to strictly limited amounts.
- Six days at larder temperatureSix days, at no stated temperature -- The recipe says nothing about where or how cold the meat should be kept while it pickles. Brining meat for the better part of a week without a controlled, refrigerated temperature is the classic setting for spoilage in a tightly rolled, tied joint whose interior is sealed away from air.
- Rolling makes it worse, not betterBoning, rubbing salt on the inside and binding into a round encloses the former bone surfaces at the centre of the mass. Brine penetrates slowly and unevenly into rolled meat, so the middle is the last part to cure and the first part to fail.
- What to do insteadIf you want salt beef, use a current recipe that gives the weight of salt, the weight of curing salt, the volume of water and a refrigerator temperature. Boiling a properly cured joint gently until tender, with carrots and turnips added to the pot, is sound practice — the cure is the part that needs replacing.
- On the cost line"10d. per lb." is ten pence in pre-decimal currency, twelve pence to the shilling. It is a period price marker only and gives no useful guide to what a boned rib costs now.
Salted or "pickled" beef was a staple of the English larder long before it was a delicacy: brining was how a household kept a large joint edible in the days before domestic refrigeration, and boiled salt beef with carrots and turnips belongs to the same tradition as the corned beef still sold at delicatessen counters. Mrs Beeton's household books are full of these joints because a family that bought meat by the rib rather than the chop needed a way to spread it across a week, and the entry's cheerful subtitle — "For a small Family" — is a reminder that a five-pound round counted as modest. The plated or silver skewer substituted at the table is pure Victorian presentation: the working skewer that held the roll together during six days of brining and two hours of boiling was never meant to be seen by guests.