Beef, Stewed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons. A thick beef or rump-steak of about 2 lbs., an onion, some bread-crumbs, pepper and salt, 2 oz. of butter. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d.
Mince the onion fine, mix it with the bread, pepper, and salt; make deep incisions in the beef, but do not cut it through; fill the spaces with the bread, &c.
Roll up the steak and put it into a stewpan with the butter; let it stew very gently for more than 2 hours; serve it with its own gravy, thickened with a little flour, and flavoured as may be required, either with tomato sauce, ketchup, or Harvey's sauce.
TIME. About 2 hours, or rather more.
SEASONABLE at any time. (A Polish dish.)
A stuffed, rolled steak braised very slowly — essentially Polish zrazy zawijane as it reached a Victorian English kitchen. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to supply, chiefly about liquid.
- The hinge: there is no liquidTwo ounces of butter will not carry a 2 lb roll through two hours; on a modern burner it will scorch long before the meat is tender. Add enough stock or water to come a third of the way up the roll, keep it at a bare shiver, and turn the meat once or twice. The "own gravy" the recipe promises is the reduced braising liquid.
- StewpanA heavy lidded pan used on the hob, not a casserole dish for the oven. A Dutch oven or any heavy pot with a tight lid does the job. If you prefer the oven, 300F holds a steadier low temperature than most gas rings.
- The cutA "thick beef or rump-steak of about 2 lbs." means a single thick slab cut across the rump rather than a portioned steak — nearer what a butcher now calls top rump or a braising joint. The recipe gives no thickness. Ask for it in one piece and have it beaten a little flatter before you stuff it.
- Incisions, then rollingBeeton has you cut deep pockets into the meat, pack them with stuffing, and then roll the whole thing. In practice it is easier to butterfly or beat the steak into a sheet, spread the onion and crumb mixture over it, and roll from the short edge. Tie at intervals with kitchen string or the filling escapes into the pan.
- The stuffingNo quantity is given for the breadcrumbs. About a cup of fresh crumbs to one finely minced medium onion gives a stuffing that holds together; dry crumbs will need a spoonful of the butter worked through them.
- Harvey's sauceA commercial anchovy-and-soy condiment of the period, now discontinued. Worcestershire sauce is the closest survivor and comes from the same family of fish-based English bottled sauces.
- Browning firstThe original goes straight to the stew. Searing the tied roll in the butter until it takes colour costs five minutes and does most of the work of the finished gravy's flavour.
- Yield and costFour to five portions, as stated. The 2s 3d is a Victorian shopping figure and tells you only that this was a modest family dinner rather than a company dish.
Beeton's parenthetical "(A Polish dish.)" points to zrazy zawijane, the rolled and stuffed beef that has been a fixture of Polish cooking for centuries and appears in cognate forms across central Europe — German Rouladen, Czech závitky. The technique is the same everywhere: take a cut too lean and sinewy to grill, flatten it, wrap it around a savoury filling, and braise it long enough for the connective tissue to give way. English cooks of the period had a related but distinct dish in beef olives, rolled from thinner slices. Its appearance here reflects the habit of Victorian household manuals of collecting foreign dishes and naturalising them, trimming the seasoning back to onion, crumbs and pepper and then offering bottled sauce at the finish — the tomato, ketchup or Harvey's — as the concession to flavour.