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Roast Beef
Mrs. C. Belford.
Prepare for the oven by dredging lightly with flour, and seasoning with salt and pepper; place in the oven, and baste frequently while roasting. Allow a quarter of an hour for a pound of meat, if you like it rare; longer if you like it well done. Serve with a sauce, made from the drippings in the pan, to which has been added a tablespoon of Harvey or Worcestershire sauce, and a tablespoon of tomato catsup.
A bare-bones roast with no oven temperature and no cut named, which was normal in 1877 when the cook was expected to know her own range. The useful modern change is to stop counting minutes and start reading internal temperature.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because wood and coal ranges were judged by hand and by how quickly flour browned. Start at 450F for the first 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- TimingFifteen minutes to the pound is a rough guide that fails badly on thin cuts and on anything under about 4 lb. Pull the roast at 120-125F internal for rare, 130-135F for medium rare; a thick sirloin or rib will carry over another 5-10 degrees while resting.
- RestingThe recipe does not mention it. Rest the meat 15-20 minutes under loose foil before carving, and make the sauce in the pan during that time.
- Harvey sauceA commercial anchovy, walnut ketchup and soy condiment of the period, largely gone from shops. Worcestershire, which the recipe offers as the alternative, descends from the same family of sauces and is the sensible substitute.
- Tomato catsupCatsup of this period was generally thinner and sharper than the modern bottle, and often much less sweet. Use a tablespoon of modern ketchup if you like, but taste before adding more, or reach for a spoonful of tomato paste loosened with stock instead.
- The pan saucePour off most of the fat first, then deglaze the browned drippings with a little stock, wine or water before stirring in the two sauces. Straight drippings plus condiment, as written, will be very salty and very greasy.
- BastingFrequent basting was worth doing in a drafty oven with no fan; in a modern enclosed oven it mainly costs you heat every time the door opens. Twice is plenty.
- Cut and yieldThe recipe names no cut; a roast of this kind would most likely have been a standing rib, sirloin or top round. Reckon about 12 oz bone-in or 6-8 oz boneless per person.
Roast beef was the dish English-speaking cooks felt least need to explain, which is why Mrs. Belford's entry runs to three sentences and never says what part of the animal to buy. What the recipe really documents is the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for bottled sauces: Harvey's and Worcestershire were both anchovy-based descendants of the fish-and-spice condiments that came into British cookery in the eighteenth century, and tomato catsup was by the 1870s an ordinary pantry item rather than a novelty. Earlier practice more often sent the pan drippings to the table plain, or with horseradish alongside. The Home Cook Book itself was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, one of the earliest of the North American charity cookbooks, which is why so many of its recipes read like notes passed between people who already knew how to cook.