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Cold Ribs of Beef with Jelly
Remove bones and neatly pare the roast beef left over from yesterday, then cut in exceedingly thin slices. Nicely dress slices on a large cold dish. Cut in small pieces four tablespoons jelly, arrange around beef with six lettuce leaves and twelve small vinegar pickles and serve.
A cold plate rather than a cooked dish, and it lives or dies on the carving. Everything else is arrangement.
- Slice cold and thinThe roast must be refrigerator-cold and firm before you touch it; warm beef tears. Use a long, thin-bladed knife and cut across the grain into slices you can nearly see through.
- What "jelly" means hereIt may mean savoury aspic jelly, set from the strained roasting juices or a good clarified stock, chopped into glittering pieces. Currant jelly, the other common reading, is a sweet foil for beef and equally plausible; the original does not say, so choose deliberately.
- Four tablespoons is smallThat quantity is a garnish, not a sauce. If you are using aspic, set it in a shallow tray so it turns out in a thin sheet you can chop into clean dice.
- Vinegar picklesThese are cornichons or small sour gherkins, not sweet pickle chips. Twelve of them dress the whole platter.
- Handling the leftover safelyBeef roasted yesterday should have gone into the refrigerator within two hours of coming off the heat and be eaten within three to four days. Pare off any dried or discoloured surface before slicing.
- ServingThe original gives no yield. Season the sliced beef with salt and a grind of pepper just before it goes out, since chilling flattens flavour, and serve the dish genuinely cold.
This is a dish of leftovers -- the second appearance of a joint -- and Filippini's International Cook Book is full of them, because a large rib roast was expected to carry a household for more than one meal. The cold sideboard joint was a fixture of Anglo-American luncheon and supper tables: sliced beef, a sharp pickle, a leaf of salad, and chopped aspic for gloss and a little bite of gelatine richness. Filippini had cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and the plating instruction here -- pare it neatly, slice it exceedingly thin, dress it on a large cold dish -- is restaurant discipline applied to a domestic leftover. The pairing of beef with either a savoury jelly or a tart red currant jelly is long established in English practice, which is part of why the recipe can get away with naming neither.