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Casserole Roast
3 or 4 pounds beef Slice of salt pork 1/4 carrot 1/4 turnip 1/4 onion A few peppercorns Stalk of celery chopped 2 cups water or stock Render For this roast select beef from the round or rump. out the pork; brown the meat on both sides in the fat. Chop the vegetables; put the meat in the casserole with the vegetables around it; add the water or stock and cook in a hot oven for three hours, basting occasionally. When done make a brown sauce, using the juice left in the casserole.
Courtesy of the Guernsey Earthenware Co.
This is a braise rather than a roast, written as advertising copy for a maker of covered earthenware. A few things need translating before it behaves.
- "Casserole" here"Casserole" here means the vessel, not the dish — a lidded earthenware pot of the sort Guernsey Earthenware sold. A Dutch oven or heavy lidded braiser is the direct equivalent; the lid is assumed even though the recipe never says so.
- The hinge: keep it covered and keep it lowThe hinge: keep it covered and keep it low. Three hours at anything a period cook would call a "hot oven" (roughly 400–450F) will dry out a round or rump before the connective tissue softens. Round and rump are braising cuts: covered, at 300–325F, with the liquid barely bubbling, three hours is about right for 3–4 lb.
- Salt pork"Render out the pork" means cut a slice of salt pork into small pieces and cook it slowly until the fat runs, then brown the beef in that fat. Fatty bacon or pancetta works; a very lean modern salt pork may need a spoonful of oil to start.
- Fractional vegetablesA quarter carrot, quarter turnip and quarter onion assume large winter vegetables — figure a couple of tablespoons to a quarter cup of each, chopped. They are aromatics for the sauce, not a side dish, and they will collapse by the end.
- Two cups of liquidThat is enough to come partway up a 3–4 lb piece of beef, which is what a braise wants. Check once an hour, and if it threatens to go dry add hot stock rather than cold water.
- Basting a covered potEvery basting means lifting the lid and losing heat and steam. Two or three times over three hours is plenty.
- The brown sauceStrain the pan juices, skim the fat, and thicken with a roux made from some of that fat plus an equal weight of flour — the standard brown sauce of the period. Taste before salting: salt pork and reduced stock together can carry it far enough already.
- Yield3–4 pounds of boneless round or rump serves six to eight, and it slices more neatly after resting 15 minutes.
The credit line at the end explains the recipe: the Guernsey Earthenware Company of Cambridge, Ohio, supplied it to promote its lidded brown-glazed cooking ware, and cook books of this era were often assembled with such contributed pages from manufacturers. The word casserole was still shifting in American English at the time — it had come from French for the cooking pot itself, and only later settled into meaning the food baked inside one, which is why a piece of beef braised in liquid could be advertised as a "casserole roast."