Mock Duck
1 pound round steak 4 tablespoons bread crumbs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1/2 teaspoon powdered sage 2 teaspoons chopped onion Milk to moisten the bread Purchase a steak of uniform thickness and remove all the fat. Prepare a filling as follows: Mix together the crumbs, salt, pepper and sage; scald the onions to soften them and to remove the strong flavor, and add them to the crumbs, moistening all with milk. Wipe the steak with a damp cloth; spread the filling evenly over the meat; roll and tie it, sewing the ends to keep it together. Place it in a roasting pan with a little water and bake for about three quarters of an hour, basting frequently. Serve with currant jelly.
A stuffed, rolled round steak that stands in for roast duck by way of sage stuffing and currant jelly. The original assumes a hot oven and a cook who will stay near it.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Roast at 350F; three quarters of an hour at that heat brings a 1 lb rolled steak through, though round is lean and a thicker roll may want closer to an hour.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a generous pinch of pepper.
- Buy the right cut"A steak of uniform thickness" means a single flat slice of round, cut thin enough to roll, not a thick roast. Ask for it cut for rolling, or butterfly and pound a thicker piece to an even thickness so it will roll without splitting.
- Scalding the onionThe step is not optional in this recipe's logic: raw onion in a stuffing cooked only 45 minutes stays sharp and crunchy. Pour boiling water over the chopped onion, drain well, then mix in, or sweat it briefly in butter.
- Tying and sewingButcher's twine at 1 inch intervals does the work of the sewing; closing the ends with a couple of stitches or a folded-in flap keeps the crumbs from washing out during basting.
- Basting and the waterA little water in the pan, perhaps 1/2 cup, plus frequent basting is what keeps lean round from drying. Add more as it evaporates and the pan liquid becomes the gravy base.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from stale bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb far more milk. Moisten only until the mixture holds together when pressed.
- YieldOne pound of steak with this filling serves two, three at a stretch with potatoes. Rest 10 minutes before slicing the roll crosswise into rounds.
"Mock" dishes fill a whole vein of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery, where the point was to reproduce the flavor signature of an expensive dish with a cheap ingredient: mock turtle soup from a calf's head, mock apple pie from crackers, mock duck from a slice of round steak. What makes this duck rather than beef is the seasoning, since sage stuffing and tart currant or cranberry jelly were the standard accompaniments to roast duck and goose on American tables, and the flavors alone were enough to name the dish. Round steak was an inexpensive cut, though dearer than shin, flank or chuck, and the stuffing stretches a single pound to feed more people, which is why the recipe sits comfortably in a domestic-science era cookbook of this kind. Similar rolled and stuffed beef appears across European cooking as well, from German Rouladen to Italian involtini, so the technique long predates the American name given to it here.