Steak
1 small skirt steak 1 cup stock 1 slice carrot 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 tablespoon chopped onion Trim the steak; sprinkle it with parsley and onion; season with pepper and salt; roll and tie it. Place it in a small roasting pan with the stock (or water if you have no stock), carrot and bay leaf and roast for one hour, basting constantly. Serve with tomato or brown sauce.
A braise disguised as a roast: the covered pan and cup of stock do the work, and the skirt steak needs the moisture. A few points on translating it.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which is normal for the period. For a rolled skirt steak sitting in stock, 325-350F for the full hour is the sensible reading; much hotter and the liquid boils away before the meat gives up its toughness.
- Skirt steak then and now"Small skirt steak" meant the diaphragm muscle, sold cheap and thin enough to roll. Today's skirt is a fashionable grilling cut and may be sold in long pieces; flank or a thin-pounded piece of top round rolls easily and is often cheaper.
- Rolling and tyingScatter the parsley and onion over the steak, then roll and tie it. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals keeps it from unwinding as it shrinks.
- Basting constantlyThat instruction belongs to an open pan in a coal range. In a modern oven, cover the pan for the first 45 minutes so the stock steams the meat, then uncover and baste two or three times to glaze the outside.
- StockThe recipe permits water, but the cup of liquid is the whole sauce base. A light beef or veal stock, unsalted or lightly salted, is worth using; commercial broth is often salty enough that you should hold back on seasoning the meat.
- The carrot and bay leafThese are aromatics for the pan liquid, not a garnish. Fish out the bay leaf before serving and either discard the carrot slice or mash it into the pan juices.
- Brown or tomato sauceBoth would likely have been made from scratch in this book's kitchen. The pan liquid, strained and reduced with a little butter and flour whisked in, gives a brown sauce with no extra work; for the tomato version, add a few spoons of passata to the reduced juices.
- YieldOne small rolled skirt steak serves two, or three thinly sliced with a starch. It slices most cleanly after five minutes' rest.
Skirt steak was for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a butcher's afterthought -- a coarse-grained, strongly flavored muscle from the belly wall, cheap because it demanded either quick searing or long moist cooking and punished anything in between. Stuffing, rolling and tying such a cut is an old economy trick, the string making one tidy joint out of an awkward flap and the herbs inside doing the work of a stuffing without the cost of one. In Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book the liquid is specified as stock first, with water only as a concession. The dish belongs to the same family as the French paupiette and the Italian involtini.