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Roast Ribs of Beef
Procure from a reliable butcher a three-rib piece of fine, tender, mature rib of beef--near the short-loin part. Saw off the spine, also the bones of the three ribs, to one inch from the meat. Season with a tablespoon salt, equally divided all over, tie it together and place it lengthwise in a roasting pan. Pour one and a half tablespoons cold water into the pan to prevent burning; place a few small bits of butter well distributed on top of the beef. Set it in a rather moderate oven and let roast for one hour and ten minutes, taking care to baste frequently with its own gravy and to turn it once in a while. Remove it from the oven, untie, dress on a very hot dish, skim the fat from the gravy, pour two tablespoons broth into the gravy, heat up a little, strain the gravy into a saucebowl and send to the table. (Keep all parings from the beef for soup stock, etc.)
A plain standing rib roast written for a cook who could ask a butcher to saw the chine and knew a joint by feel rather than by thermometer. Two things need translating: the oven and the doneness.
- The cutA three-rib piece from the short-loin end is the first cut, the loin end of a standing rib roast, and will weigh roughly 6 to 9 lb bone-in. Ask for the chine (spine) removed and the rib bones sawn short to an inch, exactly as written; many butchers will also cut the bones free and tie them back on, which makes carving easier.
- "Rather moderate oven""Moderate" in period usage is generally read as about 350F, so "rather moderate" probably means a little below that; roughly 325-340F is a fair reading for a joint this size.
- Time is the weak pointOne hour ten minutes on a 7 lb bone-in roast is rare to the point of blue at the centre. Cook to internal temperature instead: 120-125F for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, taken in the thickest muscle away from bone. Expect closer to 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours at 325F.
- The waterOne and a half tablespoons of water in a large roasting pan is a token splash and will vanish in minutes. It is there only to keep the first drippings from scorching; a quarter cup does the job better without steaming the surface.
- Turning and bastingModern practice is to set the roast bone-side down on the ribs, which act as their own rack, and leave it alone. Turning a heavy joint repeatedly costs oven heat and tears the crust. Basting adds little to a fatty rib roast, though it does no harm.
- RestingThe recipe sends it straight to the dish. Rest the roast 20 to 30 minutes, loosely tented, before carving, or the juices you were told to save end up on the board.
- The gravyThis is a thin pan jus, not a thickened gravy: skim the fat, loosen the browned bits with the broth, strain, serve in a sauceboat. Two tablespoons of broth is a starting point for a small quantity of drippings; scale it to what the pan actually gives you.
- YieldThree ribs serve 6 to 8 generously, with enough left for cold beef the next day.
Alexander Filippini is generally associated with the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his cookbooks carry that restaurant's habit of specifying the exact cut and the exact butcher's cut-work before saying a word about heat. The instruction to take the ribs "near the short-loin part" is the point of the whole recipe: the first cut of the rib, nearest the loin, has the largest eye and the least of the coarser cap muscle. Roast beef of this kind was the fixed centre of the Anglo-American formal dinner, carved at table or on a sideboard, and the closing note to keep the parings for stock is characteristic of professional kitchens of the period, where the roast, the soup and the sauce were all expected to come out of the same animal. Note too what is absent: no flour, no browning, no thickening. The gravy is simply the skimmed pan juice let down with broth, though thickened roast gravies were common enough in respectable houses of the period.