No. 1342

Rump of Beef, Greek Style

Pointe de Culotte de boeuf a la Grecque

Prepare and cook a piece of beef as explained for a la Careme (No. 1338); glaze and place around it a garnishing of tomatoes, Greek style, prepared as explained below; serve at the same time the braise stock, strained, skimmed and reduced.

Stuffed Tomatoes, Greek Style.—Chop very fine one pound of lean beef, veal or lamb with two ounces of beef suet; bake two large onions till quite brown, chop them up with the meat, adding pepper, salt and a little water; cook the whole in a deep pan for two hours, then add a little butter and a lump of sugar, and continue cooking until quite dry, stirring it occasionally. Cut a piece off the top of some tomatoes, scoop out the centers, fill with the preparation, put back the covers, and rub them over with a little flour and powdered sugar. Place the tomatoes in a pan with small bits of butter spread over each. Pass the insides removed from the tomatoes through a sieve, add to this a little butter and a tablespoonful of oil, pour this into the pan, and bake the tomatoes slowly; they must be slightly browned when done. This same meat dressing can be utilized for stuffing cabbages or egg-plant.

← No. 1341 Rump of Beef, Flemish Style Beef No. 1343 Rump of Beef, Jardiniere →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two recipes in one entry: a braised rump of beef finished with its own reduced stock, and a tray of meat-stuffed tomatoes that carry the Greek label. The tomatoes stand perfectly well on their own.

The cutPointe de culotte is the point of the rump, near the aitchbone — in a modern butcher's terms a rump roast or top sirloin butt, 4 to 6 lb, tied. It is a braising cut, not a roast, and the actual method is not given here: the reader is sent back to No. 1338 (a la Careme) for it, so consult that entry for the braising instructions and timing.
GlazingTo glaze here means to brush the cooked beef repeatedly with the reduced braising liquid in a hot oven until it takes on a lacquered shine. Reduce the strained, skimmed stock to a syrupy consistency first; a braise from a well-gelatinous cut will do this without added starch.
The stuffing is the hingeTwo hours of covered cooking, then further cooking with butter and sugar "until quite dry," is what makes this filling work. It is not a raw forcemeat spooned into tomatoes; the meat is cooked down to a dense, almost jammy paste, which is why the tomatoes only need to bake through and colour.
Baked onions"Bake two large onions till quite brown" means oven-baking the onions until well browned and sweet, then chopping them with the meat; the recipe gives no temperature or time. This is a real flavour step, not a shortcut for softening.
Beef suetTwo ounces of raw beef kidney suet, chopped fine, supplies the fat. Butchers will still sell it on request; ground beef fat or an equal weight of butter or olive oil serves, though the texture will be looser.
Flour and powdered sugarRubbing the outsides with flour and a dusting of sugar would help the tomato skins take colour. The recipe specifies no quantity; use a light hand.
Oven and timing"Bake the tomatoes slowly" means a moderate to low oven; the recipe gives no temperature or time, only the finishing cue that they "must be slightly browned when done." The sieved tomato pulp poured into the pan thickens as they bake.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one pound of meat with the suet and onions will fill several medium tomatoes. The same filling suits cabbage or egg-plant, as the text notes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedia of the grand French repertoire, and its rump-of-beef sequence — Flemish, Greek, Jardinière, à la Carême — shows how one braise was dressed a dozen ways to fill out a printed menu. "À la grecque" in nineteenth-century French kitchens was a loose signal rather than a precise citation; here it points to the stuffed tomato, a dish genuinely at home across the Ottoman-influenced eastern Mediterranean, where cooked meat fillings for tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, and eggplant are all treated as one family, exactly as Ranhofer's closing sentence suggests. The touch of sugar with the meat and the sugared skins are also characteristic of that tradition.