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Carving (Loin of Beef upper cut Loin)
Loin of Beef (upper cut) Loin of Beef Rolled Ribs of Beef pings; season, dredge with flour and brown again. Raise the beef on a trivet, put in water to half cover it, and the vegetables sliced or cut into cubes, bay leaf and parsley. Cover closely and cook below the boiling point for about four hours. Remove meat to platter; surround with vegetables and make a brown sauce of the strained liquor.
This page is a printing casualty: the three lines at the top are captions for carving diagrams, and the text that follows is the tail end of a braised beef recipe whose opening has been lost with the facing page. What survives is enough to work from, but the searing instructions and all quantities are gone.
- What the fragment is missingThe recipe begins mid-word; "pings" is most likely the end of "drippings." The lost opening presumably called for a piece of beef browned on all sides in hot fat before the seasoning, dredging and second browning that survive. No cut, weight or vegetables are named in what remains, so any quantity is a guess.
- The hinge: below the boiling point"Cook below the boiling point" is the whole technique. Held at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, the connective tissue in a working cut converts to gelatin and the meat stays succulent; at a rolling boil the muscle fibers squeeze out their moisture and go stringy no matter how long you cook it.
- A trivet in the potRaising the beef on a trivet keeps it off the hot metal so the underside braises rather than fries. A folded rack, a few thick onion slices or a metal steamer insert does the same job in a Dutch oven.
- Dredge with flour and brown againThe flour browned on the surface in the fat contributes both colour and some thickening to the liquor. Let the flour actually take colour, a minute or two, or it will taste pasty.
- Four hours, checkedFour hours is right for a large old-fashioned cut kept genuinely below a simmer. Test with a fork rather than the clock: it is done when the fork turns freely in the meat. A low oven is steadier than stovetop if your burner will not go low enough.
- The brown sauceStrain the liquor, skim the fat and reduce it; the flour from the dredging plus reduction is usually thickening enough. Check the seasoning after reducing, since reduction concentrates the salt already added earlier.
The page belongs to the carving section of the book, where American cookbooks around 1900 routinely gave diagrammed instructions for the upper cut of the loin, the loin proper and rolled ribs — a household skill assumed of whoever sat at the head of the table, and one that mattered when meat arrived from the butcher in large primal pieces rather than trimmed retail cuts. The braising method that has drifted onto the page is the standard treatment of the era for the cheaper, harder-working parts of the animal: brown, dredge, add liquid to half the depth, and hold it just under the boil for hours. The insistence on "below the boiling point" recurs across period cookery writing and reflects a real understanding, one perhaps arrived at by long observation rather than by measurement, that boiled beef toughens while gently stewed beef does not.