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August 3
Menu: Cream of Corn Soup; Stuffed Flank Steak; Mashed Potato; Shelled Beans; Onion and Mint Salad; Ivory Cream; Coffee Stuffed Flank Steak-Buy a flank steak. Fry 2 tablespoons chopped onion in a 1/4 cup Crisco. Add 12 cup soft, stale breadcrumbs, 14 teaspoon mixed herbs, salt and pepper to taste. Spread over steak, roll and tie. Brown in 3 tablespoons Crisco, and remove to casserole or covered dish. To the Crisco in pan add an equal quantity of flour, and brown, then add 1 cup stock or boiling water, and 1 cup strained tomato, season with salt and pepper, pour over the roll, cover dish, and cook slowly until meat is tender. If cooked in casserole it may be served in same dish.
A braised rolled flank steak of the kind that filled the cheaper end of the meat counter in the 1910s. The method is sound; only the shorthand needs translating.
- The hinge: cook it low and longFlank is a lean, coarse-grained muscle that only turns tender once its connective tissue melts. The recipe says only "cook slowly until meat is tender" and gives no time or temperature; in practice that means a bare simmer, covered, for something like 2 to 2 1/2 hours, whether on a low burner or in a moderate oven. A brisk boil will tighten the meat and no amount of extra time will recover it.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, but any solid or liquid fat works: shortening, lard, or 3 tablespoons of oil for the browning. Crisco in 1913 was a new all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening sold as a cleaner substitute for lard.
- CasseroleHere this means a heavy lidded pot that goes from stovetop to oven, not a shallow baking dish. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent, and as the recipe notes, it lets you serve from the cooking vessel.
- The stuffing quantitiesThe printed amounts for breadcrumbs and mixed herbs have lost their fractions. For a flank steak of about 2 lb, roughly 1/2 cup of soft stale crumbs and 1/4 teaspoon of dried mixed herbs will spread thinly over the meat without bursting the roll.
- Rolling and tyingButterfly or score the steak thin, spread the stuffing to within an inch of the edges, and roll with the grain running the length of the roll so that slices cut across it. Tie at 1 1/2-inch intervals with butcher's twine.
- Equal quantity of flourThe pan sauce is a brown roux: about 3 tablespoons flour to the 3 tablespoons fat left after browning. Cook it until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter before the liquid goes in, or the gravy will taste raw and pasty.
- Strained tomatoThis is tomato pulp put through a sieve, closest today to passata or tomato puree from a carton. Canned crushed tomato works if you pass it through a strainer; tomato paste is far too concentrated at a cup.
- Yield and servingA 2 lb steak serves four. Rest the roll ten minutes before cutting the strings, slice about 3/4 inch thick, and spoon the tomato gravy over. Mashed potato or buttered noodles takes the sauce well.
Stuffed and rolled flank appears under many names in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, and the technique is older still: rolled, stuffed beef is a widespread idea with versions in many cuisines. Its logic is economy. Flank was a cheap, thin, sinewy cut that no one would think of roasting, so it was flattened, padded out with stale bread, and braised until the fibres gave way, stretching a modest piece of meat further. That it turns up in a promotional cookbook for a new shortening is no accident either: Crisco's makers were arguing that a manufactured vegetable fat could do everything lard did, including the browning and roux-building at the heart of a dish like this, and the surest way to make the case was to hand the housekeeper a full year of dinners built around the can.