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Larded Sirloin of Beef, Tomato Sauce
Prepare and place a mirepoix in a small roasting pan. Neatly trim and lard the top of a two-and-a-half-pound sirloin of beef. Place it over the mirepoix in the pan, baste it all over with a tablespoon melted lard, pour two tablespoons water into the pan. Season the beef with a light tablespoon salt and half a teaspoon white pepper. Set the pan in a brisk oven for thirty-five minutes, turning and basting it frequently. Remove, dress the sirloin on a large dish, decorate with a little watercress; skim the fat from the gravy; remove and place the vegetables in a small saucepan, pour in a pint of tomato sauce. Mix a little, boil briskly for ten minutes, then strain the sauce into a sauce bowl and send to the table with the sirloin separately.
A plain French-method roast: the beef sits on a bed of aromatics that later become the base of the sauce. Most of what needs translating is the oven, the larding and the salt.
- Brisk ovenRead this as 425-450F. Thirty-five minutes at that heat brings a 2.5 lb sirloin to rare or medium-rare; check for 125-130F at the centre and rest it 10-15 minutes before carving.
- MirepoixRoughly diced carrot, onion and celery, often with a little bacon or salt pork, cut small enough to cook through in the time given. Here it is a flavouring bed, not a side dish -- it ends up simmered into the sauce and strained out.
- LardingThreading strips of chilled pork back fat through the surface of the meat with a larding needle. The technique has largely vanished; a bard of fat tied over the top, or simply a well-marbled cut, does the same work.
- Lard for bastingA tablespoon of melted pork lard. Clarified butter, beef dripping or a neutral oil all behave the same way at this temperature.
- The saltA light tablespoon on 2.5 lb of meat is about 15-18 g, which is generous but defensible as surface seasoning on a roast. If your tomato sauce is already seasoned, scale it back.
- Tomato sauceA pint means the classical cooked tomato sauce of the period -- tomatoes, stock, aromatics, thickened and sieved -- not a raw purée or a modern pasta sauce. Boiling it ten minutes with the roasted vegetables and straining is what gives it body and the taste of the pan.
- Two tablespoons waterJust enough to stop the vegetables and drippings scorching in a hot oven. Top it up if the pan runs dry before the beef is done, or the fond will burn and carry bitterness into the sauce.
- YieldA 2.5 lb sirloin serves four, or three if the appetites are of the period.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a man who had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the professional French method as it was practised in American hotel cooking. Everything here is garni logic: the vegetables are not a garnish but a working part of the roast, giving the meat something to sit on, keeping the drippings from catching, and then surrendering their flavour to the sauce before being strained out and discarded. The word mirepoix is traditionally traced to the household of an eighteenth-century Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, though the attribution is anecdotal rather than documented. Larding, the other hallmark of the period, answered a real problem -- working cuts from older, leaner cattle needed internal fat to survive a hot oven -- and it faded as beef breeding and grain finishing made the meat fatty on its own.