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Roast Ribs of Beef
Break off the ends of the bones of the desired amount of ribs of beef, take out the chine-bone, and place the meat in a baking pan, sprinkle over some salt, put small lumps of butter over it, and dust with flour, baking in a moderate oven till done. When done, place on a dish, garnish with horseradish, and serve very hot.
A bare-bones professional instruction that assumes the cook already knows what a rib roast should look like coming out of the oven. Everything that matters here is in the butchery and the temperature you pull it at, neither of which Oscar bothers to state.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to time"till done" left the doneness to house style, which the book never states. Use a thermometer in the centre of the eye, away from bone: 120-125F for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, pulling 5F early since the roast climbs while it rests.
- Chine bone and rib endsThe chine is the section of backbone the ribs attach to; removing it lets you carve straight down between the ribs. Ask the butcher to remove the chine and to french or saw off the rib ends, then tie the roast back onto the bones if you want the flavour without the carving trouble.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 325-375F; 350F is a reasonable middle. Many modern cooks prefer a hybrid: 450F for the first 20 minutes to set the crust, then down to 325-350F for the remainder. Straight 350F throughout works and is closer to the original.
- Rough timingAt a steady 350F, allow roughly 15-18 minutes per pound for rare and 18-20 for medium-rare on a bone-in roast, but treat this only as a guide to when to start checking the thermometer.
- The flour dustingButter and a light dust of flour over the fat cap were standard for browning and for thickening the pan drippings into gravy. It is optional on a well-marbled modern roast; skip it if you want a drier, crisper crust.
- Rest before carvingOscar's insistence on serving "very hot" should not override this. Rest the roast, loosely tented, 20-30 minutes for a large one. A rib roast holds heat well and the juices redistribute.
- HorseradishMost likely freshly grated root heaped alongside rather than a creamed sauce, though the recipe says only "horseradish" and prepared versions existed. Freshly grated horseradish loses its heat fairly quickly unless acidulated, so grate it close to serving.
- YieldFigure one rib for every two diners, or about 1 lb of bone-in roast per person. A three-rib roast of 6-7 lb serves six generously.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s onward, and his 1896 Cook Book reads less like a domestic manual than a set of notes from a professional kitchen: terse, confident, and silent about anything a trained cook would already know. Roast ribs of beef was the anchor of the American hotel and chophouse menu of the period, carved from a trolley in front of the room, and it survives in that form as the British Sunday joint and as the "prime rib" of the mid-century steakhouse. The name is a butcher's description rather than a dish name; "prime" in the American usage later attached itself to the cut through the USDA grading system, established well after this book, and does not appear here. The instruction to remove the chine-bone is the one piece of real technique Oscar offers.