Roast Beef
Take a rib-piece or loin-roast of seven to eight pounds. Beat it thoroughly all over, lay it in the roasting dish and baste it with melted butter. Put it inside the well-heated oven, and baste frequently with its own fat, which will make it brown and tender. If, when it is cooking fast, the gravy is growing too brown, turn a glass of German cooking wine into the bottom of the pan, and repeat this as often as the gravy cooks away. The roast needs about two hours time to be done, and must be brown outside but inside still a little red. Season with salt and pepper. Squeeze a little lemon juice over it, and also turn the gravy upon it, after skimming off all fat. - Mrs. L. S. Williston, Heidelberg, Germany.
A straightforward standing rib or loin roast, cooked hot and fast with a wine-deglazed pan gravy. The instructions assume a coal range and a cook standing over it, so the temperature work is left to your judgement.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not timeTwo hours for seven to eight pounds is roughly right for a hot oven, but the doneness the recipe asks for -- brown outside, still a little red within -- is a thermometer question. Pull the roast at 125-130F in the centre for rare to medium-rare; it will climb several degrees as it rests.
- "Well-heated oven"Start at 450F for the first 20-30 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder. Holding 450F throughout for two hours will overcook the outer inch badly before the centre comes up.
- "Beat it thoroughly all over"Most likely a tenderising step, aimed at beef that was often older and tougher than what a butcher sells now. Modern rib and loin cuts need nothing of the kind; pounding a rib roast only ruptures the muscle and costs you juice.
- German cooking wineAn ordinary dry table wine, not the salted "cooking wine" sold today. A dry Riesling or a light red both work. "A glass" is not defined here; anything from a wineglassful (about a quarter-cup) upward would suit the purpose.
- BastingBasting does less for browning than the recipe suggests, and opens the oven repeatedly; it does, however, keep the pan drippings from scorching. Adding wine to the pan when the fond darkens is the same technique as deglazing, done in stages.
- RestingThe recipe gives no rest, and a roast this size needs 15-20 minutes loosely tented before carving, or the juices run out onto the board. Make the gravy during that window.
- Seasoning orderSalt and pepper are called for at the end. Salting the surface an hour ahead, or the night before, gives a better crust and seasons more than the outermost layer.
- YieldSeven to eight pounds of bone-in rib serves 8-10 generously, rather more if there is a full table of side dishes.
The attribution is the interesting part: Mrs. L. S. Williston writing from Heidelberg, contributing to an American regional cookbook compiled largely from readers' and subscribers' recipes, as such volumes were. The lemon juice squeezed over the finished meat and the repeated additions of German cooking wine to the roasting pan are German practice rather than Anglo-American -- an English or Southern roast of the same period would more often be floured, basted with its own fat alone, and served with a flour-thickened brown gravy. Cooking beef to a red centre was also less universal than it now seems; heavy roasts were commonly cooked through, and the insistence here on rare meat reads as a deliberate instruction rather than an assumption. The "beat it thoroughly" step is the clearest marker of its age, dating from when working cattle came to the butcher old and tough and mechanical tenderising was a common step before roasting.