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Headless Sparrows
Take two pounds of beef, which must be lean and cut in thin slices. Cut your slices of beef in pieces of five inches by three. Put in the middle of each piece a little square of very fat bacon, a sprig of parsley, pepper and salt. Roll up the slices and tie them round with a thread so that the seasoning remains inside. Melt in a pan a lump of butter the size of a very egg. Let it get brown and then, after rolling the beef in flour, put them in the butter. Let them cook thus for five minutes, add half a pint of water, and let them simmer for two hours. Fill up with water if it becomes too dry. Before serving, take great care to remove the threads.
This is the Belgian oiseaux sans tête — beef olives, or "blind finches" — and the method is sound as written. A few of the measurements and assumptions need translating.
- The cut matters mostTwo pounds of lean beef cut in thin five-by-three-inch slices means top or bottom round, or thin-sliced chuck, pounded to about a quarter inch. Ask a butcher for braising steak sliced for rouladen; slices cut too thick will not roll, and slices from a tender quick-cooking cut will go dry over two hours.
- "A lump of butter the size of a very egg"Almost certainly a slip for "the size of an egg," a measure common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery and usually reckoned at roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Use enough to film a heavy pan generously.
- Half a pint of waterThe book was published in England out of Belgian practice, so this is most likely the imperial half pint, 10 fl oz. Start with a cup and top up as instructed. Brown ale, or a mixture of stock and beer, is a common alternative braising liquid for these rolls.
- Tying and untyingKitchen twine, two ties per roll, snug enough to hold the bacon and parsley in but not so tight the meat splits as it shrinks. The closing instruction is the one that ruins the dish if ignored: pull every thread before the rolls reach the table, and count them out against the number you tied.
- Five minutes in the butterThat is a browning, not a cooking. Do it in batches over medium-high heat so the flour coating colours rather than steams — crowding the pan is the usual reason the sauce ends up pale.
- The simmerTwo hours at a bare shiver, covered, on the lowest burner. A hard boil in that little liquid will tighten the beef before the collagen has time to soften.
- Seasoning inside onlyAll the pepper and salt goes into the rolls, so the braising liquid arrives unseasoned. Taste and correct it at the end, and reduce it briefly if it is thin.
- YieldTwo pounds gives roughly eight to ten rolls, enough for four people. The traditional accompaniments are boiled or mashed potatoes and stewed apple or chicory.
Oiseaux sans tête — "birds without heads" — is the French-language Belgian name for what Flemish kitchens call blinde vinken, blind finches: a stuffed, tied, braised roll of thin beef that looks vaguely like a trussed small bird and contains none. The same conceit runs across Europe, from Italian uccelletti scappati to the German Rouladen and the English "beef olives," and it belongs to a broader thrift tradition of making a cheap braising cut go further by wrapping fat and seasoning inside it. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck during the First World War from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees in England, and sold in aid of Belgian relief; the dishes in it are domestic and frugal by nature, recorded from memory by displaced home cooks rather than copied from a professional manual. The odd phrasing here — "a lump of butter the size of a very egg," the abrupt final warning about the threads — has the sound of dictation taken down quickly and set in type without much correction.