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Beef Roulette
Chop one cupful of cold ham very fine, and mix in one tablespoonful of parsley, a dash of cayenne and one egg slightly beaten. Lay out flat one pound of round steak and spread with the mixture. Roll up tightly and tie with string. Rub well with flour. Try out quarter of a pound of bacon and brown the roll in the fat. Put the roll in a deep sauce pan. Make a gravy of the fat in the pan by adding two tablespoonfuls of flour and half pint of stock (or boiling water will do). Stir until it boils. Pour over the beef, add one tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, one bay-leaf, a sprig of parsley and half an onion, cover the sauce pan and simmer for two hours, "POMPADOURS."
Re- A pompadour is really a variety of cronstade or patty, served cold. To make a dozen of these you must have twelve pompadour moulds. These are simple cylinders of tin about one and one-quarter inches in diameter by three inches long and can be made by any tinsmith. Make a sufficient quantity of nice puff paste. Roll it out until it is not more than an eighth of an inch thick. Cut it in oblong pieces and fit it around the cylinders without covering the top or bottom. Bake the paste in this way until it is thoroughly done in a moderately hot oven. move it and let it cool. Slip out the tins and prepare the mince. To a pint of well-flavored, melted aspic jelly add half a pint of whipped cream, twelve oysters cut in dice, six anchovies pounded to a paste and all rubbed through a sieve. Stir the mixture carefully to blend all the ingredients, and when it is beginning to set fill the pompadour cylinders with it and set them away until their contents are perfectly firm. Stand them on end while you are filling them and set the plate or platter on which they stand over a pan of cracked ice, so that the contents will harden quickly at the bottom and thus not run out. Savory pompadours may also be made of a mince of chicken, lobster or salmon, in place of the anchovies. It is necessary in this rule that the aspic jelly should be finely flavored and the mixture well seasoned.
Two separate recipes have run together on this page: a beef roulade, which is straightforward, and a set of cold "pompadours" whose filling cannot be recommended. The notes below cover both, and explain where the second one fails.
- Why the pompadours failThe filling is raw oysters, diced and folded into aspic and whipped cream, then set and served cold. Nothing in it is ever brought to a temperature that would kill Vibrio or norovirus, and the mixture stands at kitchen temperature while it is blended and moulded (the recipe chills only from beneath, over cracked ice). Use a current recipe if you want a cold seafood mousse.
- Aspic jellyIn cookbooks of this period this meant a clarified, well-reduced meat or fish stock set with gelatin, usually made fresh in the kitchen; nothing sold ready-made today is quite the same thing, which is part of why the second recipe reads as opaque now.
- The steak, for the rouladeThe recipe only says to lay the round steak out flat; in practice that means a single thin slice, pounded thin enough to roll without splitting. Ask for a thin-cut round or top round; supermarket "cube steak" is already tenderised but usually too small.
- "Try out quarter of a pound of bacon"Render it slowly in the pan until the fat runs and the bacon crisps, then lift the bacon out and brown the tied roll in the fat. You want roughly three tablespoons of fat left for the roux.
- Half pint of stockOne cup. Two tablespoons of flour to one cup of liquid gives a thick gravy; it will loosen as the meat gives up juices over two hours, so do not thin it at the start.
- The two-hour simmerThis is the hinge. Round steak is lean and will only turn tender by long moist cooking, so keep the liquid at a bare tremble with the lid on, and top up with a little stock if it threatens to reduce dry. A 325F oven does the same job with less attention.
- Slicing and yieldThe roll serves three or four. Let it rest ten minutes, remove the string, and cut across into half-inch rounds so the ham stuffing shows as a spiral; slicing hot tends to unravel it.
- Oven for the puff paste"Moderately hot" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 375-400F, hot enough to lift the layers on the tin cylinders. This part of the pompadour recipe is sound on its own; the shells are just pastry tubes.
Beef rolled around a forcemeat is one of the oldest ways of stretching a tough cut, and turns up across Europe as roulade, involtini, rouladen and, in English cookbooks of this period, "roulette" or "beef olives." Cold, firm, sliceable meat rolls of this kind were wanted for sandwich fillings, picnic baskets and the cold supper table. The pompadour that follows belongs to the same cold-buffet world, an aspic-and-cream mousse set in tin cylinders lined with puff paste, and it shows how much of that cookery depended on shapes and moulds that had to be ordered from a tinsmith. The name is generally taken from Madame de Pompadour, whose name was attached to a great many nineteenth-century dishes with no connection to her at all, and "cronstade" is the book's spelling of croustade, a pastry case made to hold a savoury filling.