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Hint on Cooking Roast Beef
For roast beef to be juicy and tender when done, it should be basted every few minutes so in order to save yourself this trouble, place a large piece of beef suet on top of the roast; have baking pan perfectly dry and oven very hot; place in the oven and let cook the allotted time-say half an hour, according to the size. You can be about your inside work and in the allotted time your roast is done to a beautiful brown and is very juicy, as it has been constantly basting itself all the while with the suet.
Take roast out of pan, pour off drippings in a bowl and make a gravy on top of stove. A nice addition to this is to put half dozen or so peeled potatoes in the pan with roast when placing it in to cook, and they will be done to a nicety when the roast is. On taking up roast lay baked potatoes around same.
This was an experiment and proved very successful, and saves a great deal of work and worry.
This is a method rather than a measured recipe: cap the roast with fat and let it baste itself. The technique still works, but the timing needs translating and the fat is no longer something every butcher hands over free.
- The hinge: the suet capA slab of beef suet laid over the roast melts slowly and runs down the meat, which is what replaces basting. Tie it on with kitchen string or it will slide off as the meat contracts. If your butcher has no suet, a thick cap of trimmed beef fat or a barding of unsmoked pork fatback does the same job.
- "Oven very hot"Period cookery writing generally puts a "very hot" oven somewhere in the region of 450-475F, though the term was never precise and no degrees appear here. Start there for 15-20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F to finish, which gives a more even interior than holding a fierce heat throughout.
- "Say half an hour"Genuinely ambiguous, and short by any modern reckoning. A small rib roast wants roughly 15-18 minutes per pound at moderate heat for rare to medium-rare; cook to temperature, not to the clock. Pull at 120-125F internal for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare.
- RestingThe book says nothing about resting; it moves straight from lifting the roast to making the gravy, which will itself buy the meat a few minutes. Give it a full 15-20 minutes loosely tented; the juices the suet worked to preserve will otherwise run onto the board.
- The dry panNo water, no rack, no liquid in the bottom is deliberate: added moisture steams the underside and prevents browning. A dry, heavy pan is still the right choice.
- Potatoes in the panHalf a dozen medium potatoes need about an hour at 350F to go tender and brown in beef fat. Add them at the start only if the roast is large; with a small roast, put them in a separate pan with a spoonful of the drippings so they are not underdone.
- The gravyPour off the drippings, spoon back two tablespoons of fat, whisk in two tablespoons of flour, cook a minute, then add about a cup and a half of stock. The remaining fat, once chilled and strained, is beef dripping and keeps for weeks in the refrigerator.
- YieldA 4 lb roast with the potatoes feeds six to eight.
The self-basting fat cap is older than the cookbook that records it here — barding meat with sheet fat was standard practice in kitchens where roasts turned on a spit and there was no one free to spoon juices over them. What makes this entry a product of its moment is the framing: the author's argument is not that the beef tastes better but that one can "be about your inside work" while it cooks. Labour saved was the selling point of nearly every hint of this kind. Beef suet was also cheap and plentiful then, which is why the recipe treats it as something you simply have on hand; today it is a special request.