Stuffing
1 cup crumbs. 2 tablespoons butter (melted). 1/2 teaspoon onion juice. 2 tablespoons parsley teaspoon onion juice 2 tablespoons chopped celery 1 cup boiling water or stock teaspoon salt teaspoon paprika Trim edges of steak, spread stuffing over it, roll and tie it, and lay it on onion and carrot in pan with suet on top. Pour the water or stock into pan, cook, closely covered, for 20 minutes or more in a hot oven, then uncover and cook 30 minutes longer. Serve with brown gravy made from drippings in pan. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon paprika.
This is a braised stuffed flank steak — what later books call a beef roll or rouladen — and the page has clearly lost part of its ingredient list in printing. Read it as a method rather than a complete formula.
- The missing fractionsThe original reads "teaspoon onion juice" and "teaspoon salt" with no quantity. In books of this period those are almost always fractions (1/2 or 1/4 teaspoon) that dropped out in typesetting. Salt to taste rather than guessing.
- The missing baseTwo tablespoons of parsley and celery are seasonings, not a stuffing. A bread stuffing of this era would start from roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups soft breadcrumbs bound with 2 to 3 tablespoons melted butter and moistened with a little stock; add the herbs and seasonings listed here to that.
- The cut"Steak" here means a thin, broad, tough cut suitable for rolling — flank or round, pounded to an even 1/2 inch. A modern tender steak will not survive an hour of braising.
- Onion juiceA standard Victorian and Edwardian flavouring: onion grated on a fine grater and the liquid pressed out, giving onion flavour without visible pieces. Grated onion or a pinch of onion powder does the same work.
- SuetBeef suet laid on top bastes the lean meat as it renders. Ask a butcher, or substitute a few strips of bacon or a tablespoon of butter — lean rolled beef dries out without some fat over it.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no figure; period usage generally put a 'hot oven' somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F. The first 20 minutes covered sets the roll and gets the liquid steaming; uncovering for the last 30 minutes browns the outside and reduces the pan liquid into gravy.
- Total timeThe recipe's own '20 minutes or more' covered, plus 30 uncovered, makes fifty minutes a minimum rather than a fixed time. No weight of meat is given, so judge by the thickness of the roll; a tough cut like round is better dropped to a moderate oven and given 1 1/2 to 2 hours covered until a fork slips in easily.
- TyingButcher's twine at 1-inch intervals, or skewers. Roll with the grain running the length of the roll so that slicing crosswise cuts across the fibres.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of meat and no number of servings. Strain the pan drippings, skim the fat, and thicken with a tablespoon of flour for the brown gravy.
Rolled and stuffed steak turns up in nearly every American household cookbook between about 1880 and 1930, under names like beef birds, beef olives, or simply stuffed flank steak. The logic is thrift: the flat, sinewy cuts that could not be sold as steaks were cheap, and a bread stuffing stretched a pound and a half of beef across a family table while long moist cooking dealt with the toughness. The onion-and-carrot bed under the meat is a bare-bones mirepoix, standard practice for braising in this period, and the instruction to make gravy "from drippings in pan" assumes a cook who would never pour those away.