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Stuffed Beefsteak
Take a round steak and prepare the same as for broiling. Make stuffing the same as for roast turkey. Sprinkle one side of the steak with salt and pepper, then spread the stuffing in the center; bring the sides together and sew same as you would a fowl, then spread a small bread pan with butter, add a little water, season the outside of the meat with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. If you have a roaster, use that, if not cover with sheet iron tin. Roast one hour.
A lean cut, a bread stuffing and a covered pan: this is a braise in all but name, and the one-hour timing is the part most likely to disappoint. Round steak needs either a very short sear or a long moist cook, and an hour under cover falls awkwardly between the two.
- The hinge: cook it long, not mediumRound is lean and worked muscle, and an hour of covered roasting is likely to leave it firm and dry. Either take it to a genuine braise of 2 to 2.5 hours at a low moderate oven, or accept that the original timing probably yields sliceable but chewy meat.
- "Prepare the same as for broiling"The recipe does not say what that involves; trimming gristle and outer fat is the likely sense, and steaks of this cut were often pounded to flatten them. Ask for a round steak butterflied to about half an inch, or pound it yourself between sheets of plastic to an even thickness so it will roll.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. A covered pan with water in it suggests a moderate oven; 350F is a reasonable modern choice, or lower if you extend the time as above.
- Stuffing "the same as for roast turkey"The recipe defers to another page, so check that entry; period turkey stuffings of this type are typically stale bread crumbs or cubes, butter, chopped onion, salt, pepper and a herb such as sage or summer savory, moistened with a little stock or hot water. Keep it on the dry side, since the meat gives up juice as it cooks.
- Sewing it upUse plain cotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, or skip the sewing and roll the steak into a spiral and tie it at two-inch intervals. Remove all twine before slicing.
- "Sheet iron tin"An improvised flat lid of stamped sheet metal laid over the pan. Heavy foil crimped tight around the rim does the same job, which is to trap steam.
- "A little water"About half a cup, enough to keep the pan from scorching and to generate steam. Top it up if it cooks dry. The flour dredge on the meat will thicken it into a light gravy by the end.
- YieldNo size is specified. A steak of about two pounds with stuffing would serve four to six, cut across the roll into half-inch slices so each piece shows a spiral of meat and filling.
Stuffed and rolled beef under various names — beef birds, rouladen, braciole, the older English "beef olives" — is one of the standard answers to a cheap, tough cut. The logic is economical rather than culinary: bread stuffing stretches two pounds of round steak to feed six, and the long covered cooking that the cut demands anyway also cooks the filling. That the recipe defers entirely to another page — "make stuffing the same as for roast turkey" — is characteristic of these books, which arguably assumed a cook who had already read the whole volume and needed only the variation, not the whole method.