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Beef Squares
If you have a small piece of very good beef, such as rump steak or fillet of beef, it is more economical to cut it into squares, and grill it lightly at a clear fire. Have ready some squares of toast, buttered and hot, lay these on a hot dish with a bit of steak on the top, and on the top of that a slice of tomato much peppered and salted and a small pile of horse-radish. This makes a pretty dish and can be varied by using capers or chopped gherkins instead of horse-radish. It is a great saving to cut meat, bread, etc., in squares instead of rounds.
A canapé-style way of stretching a small piece of good steak, and it depends entirely on the beef being cut small and cooked fast. Everything else is assembly.
- "Grill at a clear fire"A clear fire is one burned down to glowing coals with no smoke or flame — the period equivalent of a very hot, even heat. Use a ridged pan or a broiler element preheated as high as it goes; squares of steak an inch across need barely a minute a side.
- Cut and thicknessThe recipe gives no dimensions. Squares of about 1 to 1½ inches, cut from steak roughly ¾ inch thick, match the toast and stay pink inside. Anything thinner will be grey through before it colours.
- Rest before assemblingLet the squares sit a couple of minutes off the heat, or the juices run into the toast and it collapses under the topping.
- Fillet of beefFillet is tenderloin. Rump steak in a British-published book of this date is the cut sold in the US as top sirloin, not what an American butcher calls rump roast.
- ToastCut the squares from a firm close-crumbed loaf and butter them while hot. Sandwich bread will go soggy; the toast is structural here, not a garnish.
- HorseradishThe pile intended is grated fresh root, sharp and dry. Jarred creamed horseradish is milder and wetter — drain it, or the toast suffers.
- The tomatoA raw slice, seasoned hard, is doing the work of a sauce. Out of season it contributes little; a well-drained slice of a good tomato, or nothing at all, beats a pale one.
- YieldReckon on three or four squares a person as a first course or savoury. A half-pound steak makes about a dozen.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and it carries the mark of two kinds of thrift at once: the frugality of ordinary Belgian home cooking and the wartime shortages of its British publication. That is the whole argument of this entry — not how to cook beef, but how to make a small piece of expensive beef look like a dish for a table. The closing line about squares rather than rounds is the point of the recipe: a round cutter wastes the corners of the bread and the trimmings of the meat, while squares use everything. Serving small hot morsels on buttered toast belongs to the British savoury course, the little seasoned dish that came after the sweet at a late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, which is likely why a Belgian household recipe was framed this way for its new audience.