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Beef Balls with Horseradish Sauce
Season a cup and a half of cold chopped beef with salt, pepper, celery salt, very little onionjuice, and lemon-juice; add one beaten egg and form into balls. Roll the balls in a very little butter in a frying-pan, and toss the balls around in it until well heated. Serve with horseradish sauce (see page 7).
A quick skillet dish built from Sunday's roast, and it stands or falls on how the beef is chopped and how briefly it meets the pan.
- Chop, do not grind"Cold chopped beef" most likely means hand-chopped to a coarse mince, in a bowl or with a knife; period kitchens also had meat choppers, but a coarse chop is closer to the intent than a smooth paste. The looser texture helps keep the balls from packing into dense little meatballs.
- BindingOne egg to a cup and a half of meat is a light bind; the mixture will feel slack. Chill it for twenty minutes before shaping, and expect small balls, about walnut size, or they will fall apart in the pan.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid. A quarter teaspoon of grated onion or a small pinch of onion powder does the same work; the point is flavour without wet pieces that break the bind.
- Celery saltStill sold, but salt it and the plain salt together rather than separately, or the dish comes out sharp. Roughly a quarter teaspoon of celery salt to the batch.
- The pan stageThe beef is already cooked. "Until well heated" means three or four minutes over medium heat, rolling the balls to colour them lightly. Longer and cooked beef dries out and goes grainy.
- Fat"A very little butter" is about a tablespoon. Butter alone will brown fast at this heat; a spoonful of neutral oil alongside it gives you more room before it burns.
- The sauceThe cross-reference is to a horseradish sauce elsewhere in the book, typically grated horseradish folded into whipped cream or into a white sauce with a little vinegar and mustard. Either version works; the cream one is served cold against the hot beef.
- YieldA cup and a half of meat makes about twelve small balls, enough for two as a main course with potatoes, or four as a first course.
Books of this kind belong to a genre that is generally traced to the years from the 1880s through the First World War, when middle-class households roasted large joints and were expected to account for every scrap of them. Left-over beef gets substantial treatment in such volumes, because a standing rib or a boiled round fed a family twice over and thrift was treated as a domestic virtue rather than a hardship. Horseradish sauce is the conventional English partner to beef, and its appearance here has the effect of telling the diner that this is still roast beef, only rearranged. The onion juice and lemon juice are typical of the period's approach to reheated meat, which was thought to need brightening rather than heavy sauce, and celery salt seems to have been a familiar pantry staple in American kitchens of the era.