Home › The World's Kitchen › Rump of Beef, Bernoise
Rump of Beef, Bernoise
Procure a three-pound slice round of beef, season it with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper and keep on a dish.
Plunge a quarter pound spaghetti in a quart boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes; drain, cut into small pieces and return them to the same pan, but without water. Place an ounce of butter in a frying pan with three tablespoons bread crumbs, toss on the fire until a light brown colour, and pour it over the spaghetti with an ounce grated Swiss and half ounce grated Parmesan cheese; season with half teaspoon salt and mix well. Plunge six even-sized green peppers in boiling water for two minutes, lift up, cut a small round piece off at the bottom of each; scoop out the interiors and fill them up with spaghetti, place the covers on and lay them on a lightly buttered tin; set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove and keep warm. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a large frying pan, lay the beef in it and cook for twelve minutes on each side. Remove, place it on a large dish. Place in the same pan one finely chopped onion and six well-trimmed fresh okras cut into slices; cook them for eight minutes, occasionally stirring. Pour half gill claret and one gill demi-glace over, add half a sound, crushed bean garlic and one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; mix a little, boil for seven minutes, pour the sauce over the rump of beef, arrange the peppers around and serve very hot.
A composed plate from a hotel kitchen: a thick pan-seared slice of beef, an okra and claret pan sauce, and stuffed peppers as the garnish. The oddity is the title — the meat called for is round, not rump.
- The cutA three-pound "slice round of beef" is a cross-cut of the round; no thickness is given. Round is lean and firm, and twelve minutes a side in butter is a long time for it, so judge by the meat rather than the clock. Carve it thinly across the grain or it will eat tough.
- Gill and demi-glaceA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of claret is 4 tablespoons and one gill of demi-glace is ½ cup. Claret is simply dry red Bordeaux-style wine. Demi-glace here means the reduced brown stock a professional kitchen kept on hand; a good reduced beef stock or a commercial demi-glace concentrate stands in.
- Oven for the peppersNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven term to translate. A moderate oven — around 350F — will serve for the fifteen minutes, since the peppers are already blanched and the filling cooked. They only need heating through and the cheese melted.
- "Half a sound, crushed bean garlic"Half of a sound (unblemished) garlic clove, crushed. "Bean" for a garlic clove turns up in American cookbooks of this period.
- Spaghetti timingTwenty-five minutes will give mush by modern standards; dried spaghetti wants 8 to 10. Since it is chopped small and baked again inside the peppers, undercook it slightly.
- OkraThe eight minutes of frying before any liquid goes in is doing real work: it cuts back the sliminess. Add the wine and stock early and the sauce is likelier to turn slippery.
- Cheese"Swiss" means Gruyère or Emmental. An ounce grated is a scant ¼ cup packed.
- Order of workBlanch, stuff and bake the peppers first, then sear the beef, then build the sauce in the same pan. The beef should rest while the sauce reduces its seven minutes.
- YieldSix, one stuffed pepper each.
This is hotel cookery of an era when American restaurant menus were written in a kitchen French that attached place-names to dishes fairly loosely. The name points at Bern, but nothing here is Swiss beyond the grated Gruyère; telling is the rest of the plate: okra and green bell peppers are Southern and Creole ingredients, spaghetti and Parmesan Italian, and the demi-glace and claret classically French. The cooks in New York's big kitchens worked exactly this way, assembling a garnish from whatever the market and the pantry offered and giving the result a European surname. The geography is in the title, not the pot.