Rolled Steak
1 Rump Steak Parsley, Salt, Pepper Bread Crumbs, Butter 1 Cup Boiling Water Flatten steak. Beat other ingredients to a cream and lay over the steak. Roll a cream and lay over the steak. Roll up the steak and bind evenly; lay in a dish with the cup of water; cover with another dish and bake forty minutes, basting frequently.
Remove cover and allow to brown before serving. Thicken the gravy with browned flour, and serve very hot. Cut and remove strings before serving.
A beef roulade in its plainest form: a single flattened steak, a herbed butter-and-crumb paste, and a covered dish of water doing the work of a braising pot. The original gives no quantities for the stuffing and no oven setting, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: cover it tightlyThe cup of boiling water and the second dish inverted over the top are what keep a lean rolled rump from drying out — this is a braise, not a roast. If your dish has no lid, seal it with foil and only remove it for the final browning.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for covered work of this kind. For the uncovered browning at the end, raise the heat — 425F for the last 8–10 minutes, or the broiler — will do it.
- "Beat to a cream"This means softened butter worked with the breadcrumbs, chopped parsley, salt and pepper until it is a spreadable paste, not a liquid. Roughly 4 tbsp butter, 1 cup soft crumbs and a generous handful of parsley suits one large steak.
- Rump steakAn American rump steak of the period was a lean, fairly tough cut from the hindquarter, next to the round. Top round or bottom round, butterflied and pounded to about 1/4 inch, is the closest easily bought modern equivalent; flank or skirt also rolls well and is more forgiving.
- Forty minutes is short for this cutForty minutes in a moderate oven should leave a well-pounded thin steak just cooked and sliceable. A thicker roll from round will likely still be tough at that point — either pound it genuinely thin or plan on 1.5 to 2 hours covered, adding water as it reduces.
- BindingButcher's twine at 1-inch intervals, or metal trussing skewers. Tie firmly but not so tight that the stuffing squeezes out at the ends.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet or a slow oven until it is the colour of cinnamon. It thickens less than raw flour — figure on half again as much — but gives the gravy the dark colour and nutty taste the recipe expects.
- YieldOne large rump steak rolled this way should serve about 3 to 4, cut into rounds roughly 3/4 inch thick and served with the thickened pan gravy.
- A printing slipThe line "Roll a cream and lay over the steak" is a duplicated fragment from the sentence before it. Ignore it.
Rolled and stuffed steak belongs to a long European family — the German Rouladen, the French paupiette, the Italian braciola — all of them ways of turning a cheap, lean, sinewy cut into something that carves like a small roast. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century carried the idea under names like "rolled steak," "beef olives" and "mock duck," often with a bread-and-herb stuffing that stretched the meat a little further. The appeal of the method is plain enough: it makes an inexpensive cut look like a company dish. It also suits the equipment implied here — no lidded casserole required, just two dishes and an oven held at a middling heat.