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Beef, Sliced and Broiled
(Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS.-A few slices of cold roast beef, 4 or 5 potatoes, a thin batter, pepper and salt to taste.
Pare the potatoes as you would peel an apple; fry the parings in a thin batter BEEF-STEAK PIE. seasoned with salt and pepper, until they are of a light brown colour, and place them on a dish over some slices of beef, which should be nicely seasoned and broiled.
TIME.-5 minutes to broil the meat.
SEASONABLE at any time. (A Breakfast dish.) Beef, Spiced. (To Serve Cold.)- INGREDIENTS.-14 lbs. of the thick flank or rump of beef, 1/2 lb. of coarse sugar, 1 oz. of saltpetre, 1/4 lb. of pounded allspice, 1 lb. of common salt. AVERAGE COST, 7d. per lb.
Rub the sugar well into the beef, and let it lie for 12 hours; then rub the saltpetre and allspice, both of which should be pounded, over the meat, and let it remain for another 12 hours; then rub in the salt.
Turn daily in the liquor for a fortnight; soak it for a few hours in water, dry with a cloth, cover with a coarse paste, put a little water at the bottom of the pan, and bake in a moderate oven for 4 hours. If it is not covered with a paste be careful to put the beef into a deep vessel, and cover with a plate, or it will be too crisp. During the time the meat is in the oven it should be turned once or twice.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two separate entries share this page: a frugal breakfast plate of broiled cold beef with battered potato parings, and a fortnight-long spiced beef cure. The first is straightforward; the second is a saltpetre cure and should be left alone.
- The hinge: pare thicklyThe hinge: it is the peel you fry -- The garnish is made from the potato parings, not the potato, so pare as you would an apple and keep the strips wide enough to hold the batter. The recipe says nothing about what happens to the peeled potatoes themselves.
- Thin batterThe book specifies only "a thin batter" seasoned with salt and pepper. A pouring batter of about 4 oz flour, an egg and enough milk to reach single-cream consistency is a reasonable modern reading; fry in hot fat until light brown and drain well.
- "Broil" means direct heatIn Beeton this is a gridiron over a clear fire; a hot grill or ridged pan is the equivalent. The book allows 5 minutes to broil the meat, but cold roast beef needs no more than a minute or two a side to heat through before it turns leathery.
- Season the beef firstCold roast beef has already given up much of its surface seasoning. Salt and pepper the slices before they meet the heat, and cut them a good quarter-inch thick so they do not curl and dry.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings, only "a few slices" of beef and 4 or 5 potatoes. It is a dish built around whatever the roast left behind.
- The spiced beef: saltpetreAn ounce of saltpetre to 14 lb of beef, applied by hand and turned daily for two weeks, gives no reliable control over how much nitrate ends up in any one part of the meat. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite salt at a fixed percentage of meat weight for exactly this reason.
- The spiced beef: a fortnight at cellar temperatureThe recipe never states a temperature for the two weeks of curing, and the safety of the whole method depends on it. A cool Victorian larder is not a refrigerator, and a warm modern kitchen would spoil the joint well before the salt penetrated. Use a current, tested cured-beef recipe if you want to make this.
- The spiced beef: coarse paste and moderate ovenFor the record: "coarse paste" is a flour-and-water huff paste used as a sealed casing and thrown away, not eaten. Beeton gives no temperatures; "moderate oven" is conventionally rendered today as somewhere around 350F, but that is a modern equivalence, not the book's own figure.
"Cold Meat Cookery" is one of the standing categories in Beeton, and it explains the whole shape of this dish: a large joint was roasted for the main meal, and the book's job was to see it decently through the following days rather than let it reappear as bare slices. Frying the potato parings in batter is thrift of an even finer grain - the peel that would otherwise be thrown away is turned into a crisp garnish. Breakfast in a mid-Victorian household of any means was a substantial cooked meal served from covered dishes, which is why a plate of broiled beef appears here under that heading rather than at dinner. The spiced beef that follows belongs to a much older tradition of salting and spicing a large piece of flank or rump to be baked, and the recipe marks it as seasonable at any time.