No. 1358

Smoked Round Top of Beef with Cream

Noix de Boeuf Fume a la Creme

Cut up as finely as possible one-half pound of smoked beef taken from a piece of the round top; set it in a saucepan on the fire with cold water, at the first boil, drain off all the water, but should the meat still be too salty, then set it in boiling water, and drain it well a few moments after. Put the well drained meat into another saucepan, with the addition of some cream, let simmer for a few minutes, then thicken it with a little fecula or corn starch diluted in cold water or milk. Cook again for a few minutes, season with salt, a dash of cayenne pepper, and finish with a little fresh butter. To thicken smoked beef with cream a little bechamel sauce (No. 409) may be used instead of fecula.

← No. 1357 Sirloin of Beef with Jerusalem Artichokes Beef No. 1359 Salisbury Steak →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is creamed chipped beef, written for a kitchen that bought a whole smoked round and sliced it to order. The whole dish hinges on the first step: pull the salt out of the meat before the cream ever touches it, or the sauce will be inedible.

What the meat is"Noix de boeuf fume" is smoked, salt-cured beef from the round. The supermarket equivalent is jarred or packaged dried beef, sometimes sold as chipped beef; a delicatessen's smoked round or bresaola-style cured round also works. It is not pastrami or corned beef, which are far wetter and more heavily spiced.
Quantities the original omitsHalf a pound of meat wants roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of cream, and about 1 tablespoon of starch slaked in 2 tablespoons of cold liquid. The original gives no measurements for either.
The desalting stepCover the shredded meat with cold water, bring just to a boil, and drain immediately. Taste. If it is still aggressively salty, drop it into fresh boiling water for a minute or two and drain again. Skipping this with modern packaged dried beef, which is very salty, ruins the dish.
FeculaFecula is potato starch. Cornstarch, which the recipe already offers, behaves nearly the same here; use arrowroot if you want a glossier finish. Slake it in cold liquid, never hot, or it will lump.
Heat controlKeep the cream at a bare simmer. A hard boil after the starch goes in thins the sauce as the granules break down, and cream at a rolling boil with salty meat in it can break.
Season lastSalt only at the end, after tasting. The meat may have brought enough on its own even after blanching.
The bechamel optionRecipe No. 409 is the book's bechamel. The recipe offers a little of it in place of the fecula, as the thickener, not in place of the cream; it gives a slightly heavier, more stable sauce.
Yield and servingHalf a pound of meat makes a small dish, enough for perhaps two to four depending on what goes with it. Creamed chipped beef is usually spooned over toast; the recipe finishes with a little fresh butter.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) after some three decades running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the book's habit of dressing a plain American staple in French: smoked round in cream sauce is the same dish as the creamed chipped beef later served at diner breakfasts and, in military mess halls, given an unprintable nickname. Smoked and salted beef rounds were an ordinary commercial product of the nineteenth-century American packing trade, and shaving them thin and softening them in cream was one common way of making a preserved meat palatable. The instruction to blanch the meat and taste it before proceeding suggests cures varied from supplier to supplier, something a modern cook working from a sealed jar can easily forget.