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Cold Boiled Round of Beef
Corn a whole round of beef in the corned beef brine, letting it remain from 10 to 14 days. Wash it, take out the bone from the center Cut some strips of unsmoked fat bacon as thick as a little finger and lard the beef with them, making incisions with a carving knife and drawing in the strips with a looped string attached to a long skewer. For the cavity in the middle whence the bone was taken roll up a thin slice of fat inclosing some chopped and seasoned beef. Roll the round up tightly in a cloth-such as a clean flour sack-and sew it. Boil about 7 hours.
Press it when done, without removing the cloth it is wrapped in, into good shape, either between two sections of a sugar trough, two chopping bowls, a dairymaid's pail or an old oaken bucket. When cold remove the cloth, trim and place on a large dish.
It is just necessary to mention that the larding with fat bacon is not essential, but is only an improvement for the tough side of the round, and to the general appearance; and that such beef rounds have been boiled in home-brewed ale.
This is a Victorian hotel-kitchen showpiece: a whole corned round, boned, larded, boiled all day and pressed cold for the buffet. The technique is legible enough, but the curing step as written cannot be reproduced safely, and the notes below explain the vessels and terms rather than offering a working method.
- The cure is the problemThe recipe defers to "the corned beef brine" set out elsewhere, so this page itself gives no salt concentration, no curing-salt quantity and no holding temperature, then keeps a very large piece of meat in it for 10 to 14 days. Curing a whole muscle that long without a measured cure and a controlled refrigeration temperature risks spoilage and, in low-oxygen conditions, Clostridium botulinum, and nothing on this page lets you verify either the brine or the temperature.
- Boning creates an interior surfaceRemoving the centre bone and stuffing the cavity with chopped seasoned beef and fat pushes raw, handled meat into the centre of a roast that is then tied inside cloth. Whatever is on the outside of that stuffing is now at the coldest, slowest-heating point of the joint.
- The cooling is as risky as the cureA boiled round of that size is pressed in its cloth and left to go cold under weight. A dense joint insulated in fabric spends many hours between 40F and 140F while it cools, and it is then served cold and unheated. Use a current recipe for corned beef if you want to make this kind of dish.
- "Round" means the whole hind legNot the modern retail top round or eye of round but the entire round of a steer, bone in, a joint weighing tens of pounds. The instruction to lard only "the tough side" most likely refers to the lean outside round, which has little marbling of its own.
- Larding, and the tool for itThe looped string on a long skewer is a homemade substitute for a larding needle: you punch a channel with the knife, hook the bacon strip into the loop and pull it through. Strips "as thick as a little finger" are lardons of roughly half an inch square. "Unsmoked fat bacon" is fresh pork back fat or green streaky, not cured smoky bacon.
- The pressing vesselsA sugar trough is the long wooden trough used to catch maple sap; a chopping bowl is a wooden bowl used for chopping. The two trough sections and the two chopping bowls give a pair of rigid concave surfaces to clamp the wrapped joint between, while the pail or bucket would hold it under a weight. The point is a flat, sliceable cross-section, not the pressure itself.
- Seven hours means a bare simmerPeriod boiled beef was held at a shivering simmer, not a rolling boil, which would shred the joint and tighten the lean side further. The cloth sack is there to hold the boned, stuffed round in shape through that long cooking.
- Boiled in home-brewed aleThe closing aside describes an alternative cooking liquid, not a step. Cooking beef in ale is a long-standing English habit, and it would have added colour and a faint bitterness to the outside of the meat.
Cold pressed round of beef belongs to the great age of the cold buffet, when a hotel or a large household might keep a boiled, spiced or corned joint standing on the sideboard to be carved thin for breakfast, luncheon and supper. Its English relatives are the "hunting beef" and spiced Christmas beef of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rounds salted for a fortnight with saltpetre, sugar and spices, then boiled or baked and pressed until they sliced like a terrine; American corned brines aimed at much the same effect. The American Pastry Cook came out of Jessup Whitehead's Chicago hotel-trade writing, and the voice here is characteristic of him: precise about the larding needle improvised from string and skewer, then wandering off into sugar troughs, dairymaids' pails and the old oaken bucket as things heavy and hollow enough to press a joint between. The larding note is candid about the fact that part of the work is done for the look of the cut face on the platter.