Stuffed Beef Breast

AKA:
Gefulte Rinderbrust

I got this from my Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book, by J. George Frederick.  It was published by Dover Publications, Inc. in 1971.

ISBN:  0-486-22676-X

Dover is stellar in my mind because they reprint, often completely, works that were published previously but may have otherwise been lost to time.  This cook book is "an unabridged republication of Part II, 'Cookery,' of the The Pennsylvania Dutch and their Cookery, as originally published by The Business Bourse in 1935."  (A bourse is a stock exchange; I wonder why they were publishing recipes!)

Gefulte Rinderbrust is on page 47, recipe #86, and looked both simple and interesting as something to do with a chunk of beef.

1 beef fillet
1 onion
1 teaspoon minced parsley
1/2 lb chopped meat
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Chop the onion, mince the parsley, add the salt and pepper.  Spread this over the beef fillet, rub in well on both sides.  Cover the fillet with the chopped meat, seasoned, and roll and tie it.  Cook until tender in covered pot with one cup of water.  Make a gravy to serve with it.

For my chopped meat, I chose ham

I had a piece of beef tenderloin.  Not exactly "breast" but I thought I could make do with it.  It was a thick slab of meat, so I cut in nearly in half horizontally (leaving a hinge) and then cut those nearly-halves nearly in half again, keeping everything connected.  This gave me a long, thin cut of meat.

See the three hinges?

My parsley patch was empty so I used basil instead.  Once the onion, basil, salt, and pepper were chopped and well-mixed, I spread it over the beef on each side, rubbing it in.  Since I was not sure quite how that works, I just rubbed until it seems like the herbs and spices were sticking and the onion had good contact.

Aye, there's the rub!

The chopped meat I used was ham.  I didn't season it because ham is already salty.  Plus I used more than 1/4 tsp of pepper in the onion mix.  It seemed like enough.  I'm sure if I had chopped the ham finer, or even ground it, it would have spread further along the beef, but I wasn't particularly concerned about it.  It rolled easily and I used two long wooden skewers instead of tying it.  All of the onion mix that fell off when I rolled the beef was piled on top of the roll before it went into the oven.

Ready to roll

Ready for the oven

It baked, with the cup of water and covered, for 2 hours at 300 degrees Fahrenheit.  That was a guess on my part.  I wanted slow cooking so it got tender without being rushed.

The Verdict:  Success!  Two hours was plenty of time -- perhaps I could have gone less -- but the meat was tender, cooked all the way through, and the flavor was lovely.  The beef was brown, the ham was red, and the onions were cream colored, so you could easily see the spiral from the rolling.  The basil was not strong; it was easily a background flavor and I could have probably spiced the meat even more without worry.  I didn't make any gravy because I wanted to taste it without that extra. There was plenty of liquid in the pan to use for gravy, if you wanted to.

Whole

Sliced

Definitely a repeater.  This is something that would be fun to serve to guests because it looks impressive once it is sliced.