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Beef Roast a L'Orleans
a A rolled rib roast is best for this purpose. The night before it is cooked, put into a broad pan three tablespoonfuls of salad oil, four tablespoonfuls of chopped onion, a dozen whole pepper corns, and the juice of a large lemon. Lay the roast in this and at the end of two hours turn it over, annointing the sides well with sauce. In the morning turn it again. When ready to cook it, put into the dripping pan, dash a cupful of boiling water over the top, and as it heats, baste with the sauce in which it has lain over night, mingled with hot water and strained. Cook ten minutes to the pound, and just before taking it up, baste all over with butter, sift flour on the top, and as soon as this froths and browns, transfer the meat to a hot dish. Garnish with water cresses.
A marinated rolled rib roast finished with the old English trick of dredging and frothing. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a roast behaves, so the two things missing are an oven temperature and a doneness test.
- Marinate coldThe original leaves the beef in oil, onion and lemon overnight, turning it twice, with no mention of chilling. Do this in the refrigerator instead, in a covered dish or a bag, and let the roast come toward room temperature for an hour before it goes in the oven.
- Boil the basting liquidThe marinade has held raw meat all night. The recipe already says to mingle it with hot water and strain it; bring that mixture to a full boil before it touches the roast, and stop basting with it in the last fifteen minutes.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a modern oven, start at 450F for the first fifteen minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Ten minutes to the poundOn a boned and rolled rib that timing will give rare to medium-rare beef. Ignore the clock in favour of a thermometer: 125F at the centre for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, then rest twenty minutes before carving.
- Salad oilIn this period the term meant a mild table oil, commonly olive or cottonseed. Olive oil or any neutral oil works; the point is a film that carries the onion and lemon against the meat.
- Dripping panA shallow open roasting pan. Set the meat on a rack so the cupful of boiling water and the rendered fat do not stew the underside.
- Flour and frothButtering the surface and sifting flour over it is a deliberate finish, not a thickener. The flour absorbs butter, puffs and browns in a few minutes under high heat, giving a lacquered crust. Return the roast to a hot oven or briefly under the broiler and watch it, since it scorches quickly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight; a rolled rib roast for this treatment would typically run 4 to 6 lb, serving roughly six to ten. Watercress is the garnish the recipe calls for and holds up well as a peppery counterpoint to the fat.
Dishes labelled à l'Orléans in American books of this era may well signal New Orleans and its French-Creole kitchen rather than the city on the Loire, though the usage is not documented, and the marinade here — oil, onion, lemon juice, whole peppercorns — is a plain domestic version of the wine-and-aromatic marinade that French cookery applied to butcher's meat. The finish is English, not French: dredging a roast with flour and butter so it froths and browns is a standard direction in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century spit-roasting, carried over into the closed range oven where it made rather less sense but survived because cooks liked the crust. The Twentieth Century Cook Book seems to belong to the run of turn-of-the-century American compilations that set such borrowed refinements beside boiled dinners and plain pot roasts, on the assumption that a middle-class household with a decent range could now attempt company food without a professional cook.