Baked Beef and Potatoes - A Historical Food Fortnightly Recipe

Today, I take on another Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge (#1 of the new series)

Baked Beef with white and sweet potatoes

The Challenge

1. Meat-and-Potatoes   They’re a staple for the tables in the most rustic cottages as well as the fanciest banquet tables - and it’s also an idiom meaning a staple or the most basic parts of something. Make a historic “meat-and-potatoes” recipe - however you interpret it.

I decided to work with the narrow, classic definition of meat as beef/veal, pork and mutton/lamb.  Game, poultry or fowl, and fish/shellfish form their own categories.  Not having to rely on seasonality of period storage options, I decided on beef - roast beef in particular.  

Selection of a recipe proved harder than I expected.  Wanting to keep 1865 as my end limit, I found that many cookbooks had rather small sections on beef cookery.  Most of the ones I examined advised boiling the beef for an hour or two before transferring to the oven.  Being a fan of rare beef, I was worried about the effect the hour plus of boiling would have on my meat.  Realizing I needed a larger, more comprehensive cookbook, I turned to the doyenne of 19th-century American cookery, Miss Eliza Leslie.  

Background (If you want to get straight to the food, scroll on down)

Eliza Leslie

A prolific author and reformer, Eliza Leslie authored the classic Direction for Cookery in its Various Branches.  Of her 9 cookbooks, this proved a runaway hit, selling at least 150,000 copies.  I worked with the 38th edition, published in 1851.

Miss Leslie begins with instructions on selecting a good piece of meat based on color of lean (bright red rather than purple) and fat (white rather than yellow).  As to cut: "For good tables, the pieces generally roasted are the sirloin and the fore and middle ribs.  In genteel houses other parts are seldom served up as roast-beef."  Being middle class and desiring to be considered genteel. I heeded her advice and purchased a sirloin tip roast, weighing just under 3 pounds.  As a frugal housewife, I was a dismayed at the cost per pound, and determined that this dinner had to succeed - it was too dear not to.
                                                                                        Roasting versus Baking

The directions for roast beef illustrate a shift in cooking during the early/mid century.  After instructing us to build up our fire at good half hour before beginning to cook, she then informs us the best way to roast beef is with the well known tin kitchen, in fact, a reflector oven.    A tin kitchen works on a reflective principle - no heat source is placed in the oven.  The oven, with whatever is being roasted or baked, is placed in front of a fire.  Heat from the fire is reflected off the curved back wall , which speeds the cooking time.    If you've ever had the opportunity to eat meat that has been rotissed at a wood fire, you will understand her enthusiasm and recommendation that it is the only way to roast meats.  Since our modern homes are not condusive to hearth cooking, we have lost the knowledge that meat "roasted" in a modern oven does not have the same taste.  

The cast iron cook-stove was the latest and greatest kitchen innovation. We, as modern people, cannot comprehend cooking without a stove and range and find period thought about the shift to be perplexing.  Part of the regret was the very real recognition that a way of life was irretrievably changing, and not necessarily for the better.  The centrality of the heath was being eliminated.  If your means were frugal, you gathered around the one hearth that would be sure to be burning - that in the kitchen.  No one gathers for cozy evenings around the cook-stove to roast nuts and tell stories.  There was also a very quantifiable difference in the food produced.  Imagine if everything we ate today came out of a microwave!
   
The story "The Pioneer Cook-Stove" expresses some of this attitude.  While it is nostalgic, my own experiences at hearth cooking show that the regret may be justified.
    "....how fastened in the left side of the ample fireplace was a crane, with diverse hooks of varied lengths, upon which were hung tea-kettle, stew-kettle, and mush pot - how bread was baked for Sundays...in the brick oven and on smaller occasions in the Dutch oven; and she will also tell you, what I honestly believe, that we have no such bread in these days.  She will tell how johnny cake was baked on a board, hoe cake on a hoe, and ash cake in the ashes; also what a sensation was produced when some cute Yankee brought out the polished tin reflector, which had most pleasing reflections, for they produced luscious pumpkin pies and delicious creamy biscuit - such biscuit! ....how admirably it baked turkey and how sound it was upon the goose question.  (by Ronald of Indiana in The Ladies' Repository, vol 17 (Cincinatti, 1857), p 39)

On to the Food!

Miss Leslie clearly expects the hearth to still be used in addition to the cook-stove.  And, to return to my own dinner, I was faced with the lack of a working hearth.  If it was summer, I could build a fire in the back yard and use a reflector oven, but, yesterday, the day of our meat and potatoes meal, was 17 degrees F at noon.  If this dinner was to occur, it would have to be made indoors with the modern equipment in my kitchen.

Miss Leslie's second option for cooked beef is the one I chose: Baked Beef.  To our way of thinking, meats cooked in an oven are roasted, but, quite correctly, they are actually baked (or stewed, but that's a different meal).   Here's the recipe:

Baked Beef

This is a plain family dish, and is never provided for company.

Take a nice but not fat piece of fresh beef.  Wash it, rub it with salt, and place it on a trivet in a deep block tin or iron pan.  Pour a little water into the bottom, and put under and round the trivet a sufficiency of pared potatoes, either white or sweet.  Put it into a hot oven, and let it bake until thoroughly done, basting it frequently with its own gravy.  Then transfer it to a hot dish, and serve up the potatoes in another.  Skim the gravy, and send it to the table in a boat.

I bought a nice sized (2.84 lb) sirloin tip at my local grocers, I was intrigued by the idea of sweet potatoes in beef gravy, but not enough to commit solely to them, so I bought some russets as well as sweet potatoes.


After salting and peppering all sides of my roast (bake?), I deviated from Miss Leslie's instructions by searing the sides of my beef in some olive oil in my Dutch oven on my stove top. I then removed the beef from the pot and inserted a round trivet, returning the meat to the top of the trivet.  There was no room under the wire trivet, so I had to be content with surrounding the beef with the pared and cut up white and sweet potatoes (which I mixed). 

As a side note, I wondered if the trivet really should have been a meat rack, which would raise the meat higher above the bottom of the pan.  Miss Leslie also gives the option of making Yorkshire pudding under the beef, and there would not have been adequate room for it under my wire trivet.

I put the beef and potatoes into a preheated 425 degree F oven.  I kept the Dutch oven uncovered, which would have returned moisture to the meat, making it even less of a roast.  I poured some water over the beef and potatoes making sure the level of liquid remained below the meat.  I occasionally basted both the meat and potatoes, at one point adding some more water.  At 50 minutes, I tested the beef with a meat thermometer, returning it to the oven for another 7 minutes, after which it had reached 120 degree F, the temperature recommended for rare beef.  Although Miss Leslie does not talk about resting the beef, I removed it from the Dutch oven to a plate and tented it with foil.

Beef, resting

The potatoes, especially the russets, needed more cooking, so I returned them to the oven for the 15 minutes the beef rested.

I carved the beef, to find it beautifully rare, and dished the cooked potatoes into a separate bowl, adding salt before bringing it to the table.  I didn't have enough cooking liquid to serve as a gravy.  And even though Miss Leslie's recipe for roast beef states pickles are ideal side dishes for roast beef, I served a foo-foo modern salad.

The beef, gloriously rare

Mixed white and sweet potatoes

Results:  a delicious dinner.  I found the beef to be a bit chewy, but it certainly wasn't because it was overcooked.  The sweet potatoes surprised me - flavored with beef juice, they were a delicious accompaniment to the meat - I may even have preferred them to the russets.  The potatoes did not need any additional butter, which also surprised me. 

Dinner!

Challenge Details

The Challenge: Meat and Potatoes

The Recipe: Baked Beef from Miss Leslies' Complete Cookery in its Various Branches
https://archive.org/details/misslesliescompl00lesl

The Date/Year and Region: 1851 (38th edition), published in Philadelphia

How Did You Make It:  see above

Time To Complete: About 20 minutes in preparation (peeling potatoes), 1 hour and 25 minutes for cooking (searing, baking, resting)

Total Cost: At close to $5.69/ pound, the beef was just over $16, and the majority of the cost.  The potatoes (both russet and sweet combined) ran less than $5.

How Successful Was It?: The beef was chewier than I like, but that may have made it a bit more accurate, since our modern beef is tenderer.  The sweet potatoes surprised me as an accompaniment to the beef.

How Accurate Is It?: Miss Leslies' beef recipe might as well be labelled "Cook in the usual manner," as are many period sewing or craft instructions.  There is an assumption that the cook will know when the beef is finished.  I chose to use a meat thermometer (well-done beef is a crime in our home) and to let the beef rest.  I also seared the beef in advance, which was not part of her directions ,yet it didn't seem to be anything particularly exotic or unusual for the period.