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Beef, Roast Sirloin of
INGREDIENTS. - Beef, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, 10d. per lb.
As a joint cannot be well roasted without a good fire, see that it is well made up about 3/4 hour before it is required, so that when the joint is put down, it is clear and bright. Choose a nice sirloin, the weight of which should not exceed 16 lbs., as the outside would be too much done, whilst the inside would not be done enough. Spit it or hook it on to the jack firmly, dredge it slightly with flour, and place it near the fire at first. Then draw it to a distance, ROAST SIRLOIN OF BEEF. and keep continually basting until the small quantity of salt over it, empty the meat is done. Dish the meat, sprinkle a dripping pan of all the dripping, pour in strain over the meat. Garnish with tufts some boiling water, stir it about, and of horseradish, and send horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding to table with it. beef are roasted in the same manner, allow- The rump, round, and other pieces of ing for solid joints rather more than 1 hour to every lb. to 16 lbs., about 4 or 4 hours.
TIME.-A sirloin of 10 lbs., 2½ hours; 14 SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. The above is the usual method of roastjuices kept in, the meat should at first be laid ing meat; but to have it in perfection and the close to the fire, and when the outside is set and firm, drawn away to a good distance, and then left to roast very slowly. Where economy is studied, this plan would not answer, as the meat requires to be at the fire double the time of the ordinary way of cooking; consequently, double the quantity of fuel would be consumed.
BEEF, ROLLED.
Beef, Rolled, to eat like Hare. -INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.- About 3 lbs. of the inside of the sirloin, 2 glasses of port wine, 2 glasses of vinegar, a small quantity of forcemeat, 1 teaspoonful of pounded allspice. AVERAGE COST, 4s.
Take the inside of a large sirloin, soak it in 1 glass of port wine and 1 glass of vinegar, mixed, and let it remain for 2 days. Make a forcemeat (see FORCEMEAT), lay it on the meat, and bind it up securely.
Roast it before a nice clear fire, and baste it with 1 glass each of port wine and vinegar, with which mix a teaspoonful of pounded allspice. Serve, with a good gravy in the dish, and send red-currant jelly to table with it.
TIME. A piece of 5 lbs. about 1½ hour before a brisk fire.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Beef Rolls. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS.-The remains of cold roast or boiled beef, seasoning to taste, of salt, pepper, and minced herbs; puff-paste.
Mince the beef tolerably fine with a small amount of its own fat; add a seasoning of pepper, salt, and chopped herbs; put the whole into a roll of puff-paste, and bake for 1/2 hour, or rather longer should the roll be very large. Beef patties may be made of cold meat, by mincing and seasoning beef as directed above, and baking in a rich puff-paste in patty-tins.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is open-fire spit roasting written down at the moment it was passing out of use, so the method needs translating to an oven before anything else. The rest is sound: a large bone-in joint, dredged, basted, and rested against the heat rather than in it.
- Spit to oven"Spit it or hook it on to the jack" covers both a horizontal turning spit and a joint hung vertically from a jack before the open grate, with a dripping pan beneath. In an oven, the nearest equivalent is a rack set in a roasting tin, bone side down, with the initial searing done hot and the long cooking at a moderate heat (roughly 450F, then 325-350F).
- "Near the fire at first, then draw it to a distance"This is the hinge, and Mrs Beeton says so twice. Set and brown the outside hard and fast, then drop the heat sharply and finish slowly. She adds that the slow method needs double the fuel, and that "where economy is studied, this plan would not answer."
- TimingThe figures on this page have not survived intact. A commonly quoted Victorian allowance for a bone-in sirloin was a quarter of an hour per pound plus a quarter of an hour over, which would put a 10 lb joint nearer two and three-quarter hours, against the two hours the recipe itself gives. A meat thermometer is more use than any of these numbers: 125-130F at the centre for rare, 135F for medium.
- Joint sizeA 16 lb limit reflects a joint cooked from one side only. Modern butchers rarely sell sirloin on the bone above 8-10 lb, which is ample for 10-14 people and behaves far better in a domestic oven.
- The flour dredgeFlouring the surface before roasting was standard practice to help form a crust and to thicken the drippings. It is optional in a hot oven and will scorch if the initial blast is too long.
- Basting and the gravyThe garbled middle of the paragraph describes a simple pan gravy: pour off all the dripping, add boiling water to the tin, stir to lift the browned residue, strain, and pour over the meat. Salt goes on at the end, not at the start.
- RestingNot mentioned in the recipe. Give the meat 20-30 minutes loosely covered before carving.
- To serveHorseradish in tufts around the dish, horseradish sauce, and Yorkshire pudding, which in this period was cooked in the dripping pan beneath the turning joint. Baked separately in beef fat at 425F is the nearest modern equivalent.
- The priceTenpence a pound is a mid-Victorian retail figure and tells you this was a joint for a comfortable household, not a poor one. It is a useful marker of what the book assumes about its readers.
Roast sirloin is the dish English cookery built its reputation on abroad, and the reason the French have called the English les rosbifs since the eighteenth century. The name comes from the Old French surloigne, the cut above the loin; the story that a king knighted a loin of beef as "Sir Loin" is a popular fancy, variously attached to Henry VIII, James I and Charles II, with no single documented source. Mrs Beeton's instructions belong to the age of the bottle jack and the clockwork jack, mechanisms that turned a joint hanging before the open range so it cooked by radiant heat while its fat dripped into a pan below, catching the Yorkshire pudding batter. Her closing note is one of the more revealing passages in the book: she knows the slow method makes better meat, and says plainly that where economy is studied the plan would not answer.