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Schaschiks-Tatarski
Procure a two-pound piece sirloin of beef, cut the lean part (only) in one-inch squares a fifth of an inch thick. Cut also, but considerably thinner, the same number of pieces raw, lean salt pork.
Place both on a plate, season with a level teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika, and arrange beef and pork on six skewers alternately, evenly divided. Place a tablespoon oil on plate, roll skewers in it, arrange on a broiler, broil for eight minutes on each side and remove.
Prepare a Creole rice, dress on a hot dish and place schaschiks over it, pour a gill hot tomato sauce around and serve.
A straightforward skewer of beef and salt pork, but the cut sizes and broiling time need rethinking before you light the grill.
- The timing is the problemBeef cut a fifth of an inch thick will be grey and dry after sixteen minutes under a broiler. Pieces that thin need roughly two to three minutes a side under high heat, or cut the beef into 3/4-inch cubes if you want the stated timing to make any sense.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is the tomato sauce poured around the base, not over the meat.
- Salt porkUncured fresh pork belly will not behave the same way; the recipe wants salt-cured pork, sliced thin so its fat renders into the beef. Rinse and pat it dry, and taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt to the beef, since the pork brings plenty.
- "Raw" salt porkHere it means unblanched and uncooked, straight from the piece. It goes on the skewer alongside the beef and cooks through under the broiler.
- SkewersMetal skewers are almost certainly what is intended here, and they conduct heat into the meat. Wooden ones want a thirty-minute soak first, and even then the exposed ends will char.
- Creole riceGenerally rice cooked with onion, sweet pepper, tomato and a little stock or butter, rather than a plain boiled pilaf. Any well-seasoned tomato-and-pepper rice will serve.
- Broiler placementSet the rack so the meat sits three to four inches from the element. Further away and the skewers steam in their own oil rather than colouring.
- YieldTwo pounds of sirloin trimmed of fat and gristle gives six skewers, enough for three as a main course or six as a first course.
Shashlik is the skewered, fire-grilled meat of the Caucasus, carried north into Russian cooking during the nineteenth century and served in Petersburg and Moscow restaurants by the time this book was compiled; the name is generally traced to a Turkic root for a spit or skewer, and Tatarski simply marks the dish as Tatar in the loose way European menus of the period labelled anything from the empire's eastern edges. What the recipe shows is less Caucasian practice than the Franco-American restaurant kitchen's habit of naturalising a foreign dish: the meat arrives on a bed of Creole rice with a tomato sauce poured around it, plated in what might be called the manner of a grand restaurant entrée rather than pulled off a charcoal brazier. The salt pork threaded between the lean beef arguably does the job that a fat-tailed sheep's fat would do in the original — basting the meat from within — with an ingredient any American kitchen of the period had in the barrel.