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Cannelon of Beef
2 lbs. lean beef, cut from round 1/2 teaspoon onion juice Grated rind 1/2 lemon 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley 1 egg ½ teaspoon onion juice 2 tablespoons melted butter Few gratings nutmeg 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon pepper Chop meat finely, and add remaining ingredients in order given. Shape in a roll six inches long, place on rack in dripping-pan, and arrange over top slices fat salt pork and bake thirty minutes. Baste every five minutes with onefourth cup butter melted in one cup boiling water. Serve with Brown Mushroom Sauce I.
A shaped loaf of chopped beef roasted uncovered on a rack, basted constantly so the outside browns without drying. It behaves more like a small roast than a meatloaf, and the basting is what makes it work.
- Oven heatFannie Farmer's day gave no numbers; a roll this size wants a hot oven, around 425F, to brown in the thirty minutes stated. Check the centre with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock, since a six-inch roll varies a great deal in thickness.
- The basting is the recipeA quarter cup of butter melted in a cup of boiling water, spooned over every five minutes, is what keeps a lean round loaf from turning to sawdust. Skipping it or basting twice instead of six times gives a dry, crumbly result.
- Chop, do not grind fine"Chop meat finely" means hand-chopped or coarsely ground. Meat run twice through a fine plate packs into a dense, pasty roll; a coarse grind holds its texture.
- Round is very leanBeef round has little fat, which is why the salt pork goes over the top. If you cannot get fat salt pork, thin-sliced unsmoked bacon or barding fat serves the same purpose. Streaky smoked bacon will dominate the lemon and nutmeg.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve; a medium onion gives roughly a tablespoon. The ingredient list carries onion juice twice, at 1/2 teaspoon and 1 1/2 teaspoons, apparently a printing duplication; use one of the two amounts rather than adding both.
- Pepper quantityThe pepper measure as printed is not a usable figure. A quarter teaspoon is the proportion that matches the teaspoon of salt for two pounds of meat.
- DonenessBecause this is chopped meat, take it to 160F throughout rather than treating it as a rare roast.
- Yield and sauceTwo pounds of meat serves six generously. Brown Mushroom Sauce I is a brown sauce with mushrooms; the pan drippings, deglazed and thickened, are a reasonable stand-in.
Cannelon is a French kitchen term for something rolled into a cylinder, from canne, a reed or pipe, and it turns up in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks for both savoury meat rolls and rolled pastry. Its appearance in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reflects the school's habit of dressing economical cuts in French names and French technique: round steak was among the cheapest beef on the block, and chopping it, seasoning it with lemon rind and nutmeg, and roasting it under salt pork turned a tough cut into something fit for a dinner course with a brown sauce. The lemon-and-nutmeg seasoning is often said to be an older English forcemeat idiom, carried into American cooking through the veal and beef "olives" and rolls of the eighteenth century.