No. 1330

Ribs of Beef a l'Hindostan

Cotes de Boeuf a l'Indostan

Prepare the piece of beef exactly the same as for the beef American style (No. 1331); set it in a dish with round slices of onions, sprigs of parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt, mignonette, a glassful of sweet oil and a little vinegar. Leave it to marinate for two hours, turning the meat over several times in its pickle, then wrap the marinade up in several sheets of strong buttered paper, also the meat, and cook as explained in the American beef (No. 1331). Wash two pounds of rice in tepid water, blanch for one minute in boiling water, and put it into a saucepan; moisten with three pints of broth (No. 194a), add three-quarters of a pound of butter, an infusion of saffron, salt, and cayenne pepper; boil and finish cooking for three-quarters of an hour in the oven; when the rice is done, take away the sixth part, which must be put in a saucepan, adding to it some allemande sauce (No. 407), and then let it get cool. Use this rice to make small croquettes for garnishing. Lay the balance of the rice on the dish with the ribs, surrounding it with the small croquettes. Serve at the same time a sauce-boat full of thickened gravy (No. 405).

← No. 1329 Ribs of Beef a la Bristed Beef No. 1331 Ribs of Beef of Thirty-Two Pounds, American →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's service dish built on a very large roast, and it only makes sense if you read it alongside No. 1331, the thirty-two pound American rib. Everything here is scaled to a banquet; the technique transfers cleanly to a domestic roast if you cut the proportions.

The scale is the first thing to fixNo. 1331 is a rib of roughly thirty-two pounds, and the two pounds of rice and three-quarters of a pound of butter are sized to match it. For a four- to six-rib roast of 8-10 lb, quarter everything: about 8 oz rice, 1 1/2 cups broth, 3 oz butter.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked white or black peppercorns, sometimes with coriander seed, crushed rather than ground. Not the shallot-and-vinegar sauce served with oysters today.
Sweet oilOlive oil, in the nineteenth-century sense of oil that is edible rather than lamp oil. Use a mild olive oil, not a peppery finishing one.
"A glassful"Genuinely imprecise. A wineglass of the period was commonly reckoned at around a quarter of a cup, though the book does not define it; for a marinade the exact figure does not matter, but scale it down with the rest.
Marinate coldTwo hours in oil, onion and vinegar would have been done in a cool larder rather than a warm kitchen. Do it in the refrigerator and let the meat come back to room temperature for an hour before it goes in the oven.
The buttered paperThis is the hinge. The marinade and its aromatics are wrapped up with the meat in several layers of well-buttered parchment, so the beef steams in its own seasoning and never takes direct oven heat. Heavy parchment tied with butcher's twine works; foil alone conducts too readily and will scorch the aromatics. The recipe gives no oven setting, referring the cook instead to No. 1331, and the paper would be opened only near the end if browning was wanted.
The riceA saffron pilaf, blanched a minute to rinse off surface starch, then baked covered. The book gives three-quarters of an hour for the full quantity but no oven setting; a quarter batch will need appreciably less time, so check it early. Infuse the saffron in a few spoonfuls of hot broth first rather than scattering the threads in dry.
The croquettesBind a sixth of the rice with allemande sauce (a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon), chill it firm, roll into small balls or corks, then bread and deep-fry them. The recipe leaves the breading and frying unstated, as it does elsewhere for croquettes.
Thickened gravyNo. 405 is the book's own thickened gravy, cross-referenced rather than repeated here. A well-reduced beef stock, lightly thickened and skimmed of fat, serves the same purpose.
ServingThe quantities imply a large banquet service rather than a household portion, though the recipe gives no number. The rice goes down as a bed, the carved ribs on top, croquettes around the rim, sauce passed separately.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, where a dish was often named for a place rather than derived from it. "Hindostan" here signals saffron and cayenne with rice, the shorthand by which French kitchens of the period gestured at India, much as "a l'indienne" did; there is nothing in the method that a Mughal cook would recognise beyond the pilaf. What the recipe does show plainly is the house's habit of pairing an enormous American roast, the thirty-two pound rib of No. 1331, with a French treatment and a foreign name, and of cross-referencing rather than repeating itself, since the book was written for professionals who owned all of it. The paper-wrapped roast is an old technique that survives as cooking en papillote, used here on a scale no domestic oven would take.