Prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau
Prawn cocktail, steak garni with chips, Black Forest gâteau was, according to a survey by trade magazine Caterer and Hotelkeeper, the most popular dinner menu in British restaurants in the 1980s. It was associated with the Berni Inn chain which popularised mass-market dining out after the end of food rationing in Britain, following the Second World War; the Prawn Cocktail Years, by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham, called this meal the Great British Meal Out. Laura Mason in Food Culture in Great Britain wrote that "In mid-twentieth-century Britain, eating out had a dreadful image. Badly served and unimaginative food, discourteous staff, dining rooms with limited and inconvenient hours". Food rationing, introduced during the Second World War, did not end until 1954 and the range of eating-out options and variety of meals available remained limited, only expanding through the 1950s and 60s; the Great British Meal Out was a meal in a restaurant designed to appeal to those for whom eating out at all was unusual and for whom a prawn cocktail, steak garni or gateau were exotic foreign food.
Nigel Slater wrote of his childhood in the 1970s: "As a family, we never went out for dinner unless we were on holiday, but there were occasional Saturday lunches at the local Berni Inn" adding "Steak garni always sounded so much more exotic than plain steak."The standardised menu suited the restaurant, who could purchase and prepare food in bulk within tight cost controls, avoided the need for the customer to choose courses from a menu which might include foods with which they were unfamiliar or which might include hard to pronounce foreign words, both of which had the potential to cause social embarrassment. The ingredients of the meal had a pleasantly sophisticated ring: "cocktail", the use of prawns, not common, "steak garni" rather than just steak, "Black Forest gâteau" rather than just cake; the meal became unfashionable as British dining tastes became more sophisticated from the 1980s onwards and the Gallup survey conducted by the trade magazine Caterer and Hotelkeeper in 1989 confirmed that Black Forest gâteau had become less popular.
Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham coined the term "Great British Meal" in their 1997 book The Prawn Cocktail Years, which includes a chapter titled The Great British Meal Out. They wrote that, "cooked as it should be, this much derided and ridiculed dinner is still something special indeed"; the meal became associated with the Berni Inn chain, established 1955 and which had 147 hotels and restaurants by 1970, making it the largest food chain outside the United States. The chain prospered by offering a menu with a limited number of options in "Olde Worlde" style restaurants that looked much the same in every branch; the most popular meal at a "Berni" as late as the 1980s, remained prawn cocktail and chips, Black Forest gâteau. In their 2000 obituary of Frank Berni, The Guardian noted "the Briton's favourite menu of prawn cocktail and Black Forest gâteau"; the Bristol Post noted that, by the 1980s, the Berni format was starting to look dated and "By Berni Inns were becoming popular shorthand for naff – prawn cocktail starter, steak & chips main, Black Forest gâteau for dessert".
The Berni Inn chain became the Beefeater chain. In 2013, The Times reported on the bankruptcy of the Scotch Steak Houses chain earlier that year, which it cast as latter day Berni Inns; the paper wrote that "for three decades has run restaurants where time – and quality – appeared to stand still. While his rivals sought to keep pace with consumer tastes, Ali Salih's Aberdeen and Angus steakhouses continued to serve prawn cocktail and Black Forest gâteau to diners seated on velour banquettes as they quaffed Blue Nun." In his 1990 novel Titmuss Regained, John Mortimer has Sir Willoughby mention "prawn cocktail, followed by steak and'all the trimmings', to be topped off with a liberal helping of Black Forest gâteau". British cuisine Chicken in a basket Sunday roast Pub grub...a history, by Paul Delplanque. Gazettelive.co.uk
Roast beef
Roast beef is a dish of beef, roasted. Prepared as a main meal, the leftovers are used in sandwiches and sometimes are used to make hash. In the United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, roast beef is one of the meats traditionally served at Sunday dinner, although it is often served as a cold cut in delicatessen stores in sandwiches. A traditional side dish to roast beef is Yorkshire pudding. Roast beef is a signature national dish of England and holds cultural meaning for the English dating back to the 1731 ballad "The Roast Beef of Old England"; the dish is so synonymous with England and its cooking methods from the 18th century that the French nickname for the English is "les Rosbifs". The beef on weck sandwich is a tradition in western New York dating back to the early 1800s. Roast beef is sometimes served with horseradish sauce. In Denmark, it is used in open sandwiches, called smørrebrød; the roast beef sandwich comprises bread, cold roast beef, lettuce and mustard, although finding cheese, fresh/powdered chili pepper, red onion would not be uncommon.
Roast Beef at Wikibook Cookbooks Media related to Roast beef at Wikimedia Commons
Beefsteak
A beef steak is a flat cut of beef, with parallel faces spaced to a thickness of 0.5–2 in cut perpendicular to the muscle fibers, with a raw mass in common restaurant service ranging from 4–20 oz. Beef steaks are grilled, pan fried, or broiled; the more tender cuts from the loin and rib are cooked using dry heat, served whole. Less tender cuts from the chuck or round are mechanically tenderized. In Australia, beef steak is referred to as just'steak' and can be purchased uncooked in supermarkets and some smallgood shops, it is sold cooked as a meal in every pub, bistro, or restaurant specialising in modern Australian food, is ranked based on the quality and the cut. Most venues have five to seven different cuts of steak on their menu and serve it medium rare by default. A steak is accompanied by a choice of sauces and a choice of either chips or jacket potato. A complementary choice of side salad or steamed vegetables is commonly offered. In the Balkan region, steak is rubbed with mustard and pepper, marinated in vinegar and vegetable oil for up to a week.
It is fried in butter, a slice of toast is used to soak up the pan drippings. The steak is topped with optional fried egg and a sprig of parsley. In France, steak is served with French fries or pommes frites in French; the combination is known as steak-frites. Vegetables are not served with steak in this manner, but a green salad may follow or be served at the same time; this is the case in Argentina. In Italy, steak was not eaten until after World War II because the rugged countryside does not accommodate the space and resource demands of large herds of cattle; some areas of Piedmont and Tuscany, were renowned for the quality of their beef. Bistecca alla Fiorentina is a well-known specialty of Florence. From the 1960s onward, economic gains allowed more Italians to afford a red meat diet. In Mexico, as well as in Spain and other former Spanish colonies, bistec refers to dishes of salted and peppered beef sirloin strips. One form of Mexican bistec is flattened with a meat tenderizing tool, covered in bread crumbs and fried.
The dish is served in tortillas as a taco. Spain and its former colonies have variations of bistec encebollado, it can be found across the Philippines in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, bistek Tagalog, a specialty of the Tagalog provinces, is made with strips of sirloin beef and onions cooked in soy sauce and calamansi juice. Unlike usual beefsteak that has different degrees of doneness, Filipino bistek is always served well done. In the United Kingdom, steak is served with chips, fried onions and tomatoes. Other vegetables such as peas or a green salad can be served. Various types of mustard are sometimes offered as a condiment. In the United States, a restaurant that specializes in beef steaks is known as a steakhouse, typical steak dinner consists of a steak, optionally topped with sautéed onions and mushrooms, with a starchy side dish. Chili, pasta, or beans are common sides. A side salad or a small serving of cooked vegetables accompanies the meat and side, with corn on the cob, green beans, creamed spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms and onion rings being popular.
A well-known accompaniment to steak is shrimp or a cooked lobster tail, a combination called "surf and turf" or "reef and beef", "pier and steer". Rounding out an American steak dinner is some sort of bread a dinner roll. Special steak knives are provided, which are serrated, though straight blades work. Prepared condiments known as steak sauces are on the table in steakhouses. Tenderized round or sirloin steaks and pan-fried or deep-fried, are called chicken fried or country fried steaks, respectively. Thinly sliced ribeye or other tender cuts, cooked on a hot griddle and shredded and served on Italian style rolls are called Philly steaks, named after Philadelphia, the city in which they became famous; the amount of time a steak is cooked is based upon personal preference. A vocabulary has evolved to describe the degree; the following terms are in order from least cooked to most cooked: Raw — Uncooked. Used in dishes like steak tartare, gored gored, tiger meat and kitfo. Seared, Blue rare or rare — Cooked quickly.
The steak will be red on the inside and warmed. Sometimes asked for as "blood rare" or "bloody as hell". In the United States and United Kingdom, this is sometimes jokingly asked for "still mooing", suggesting the meat is to be so rare that the animal is still alive. In the United States, this is sometimes referred to as'Black and Blue' or'Pittsburgh Rare'. In Germany this is known as "English Style or bloody", it is common for chefs to place the steak in an oven to warm the inside of
Beef Wellington
Beef Wellington is a preparation of fillet steak coated with pâté and duxelles, wrapped in puff pastry and baked. Some recipes include wrapping the coated meat in a crêpe to retain the moisture and prevent it from making the pastry soggy. A whole tenderloin may be wrapped and baked, sliced for serving, or the tenderloin may be sliced into individual portions prior to wrapping and baking; the origin of the name is unclear, with no definite connection to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. Leah Hyslop, writing in The Daily Telegraph, observes that by the time Wellington became famous, meat baked in pastry was a well-established part of English cuisine, that the dish's similarity to the French filet de bœuf en croûte might imply that "Beef Wellington" was a "timely patriotic rebranding of a trendy continental dish". However, she cautions, there are no 19th-century recipes for the dish. There is a mention of "fillet of beef, a la Wellington" in the Los Angeles Times of 1903, an 1899 reference in a menu from the Hamburg-America line.
It may be related to ` steig' or steak Wellington, an Irish dish. An installment of a serialized story entitled "Custom Built" by Sidney Herschel Small in 1930 had two of its characters in a restaurant in Los Angeles that had "beef Wellington" on its menu; the first occurrence of the dish recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is a quotation from a 1939 New York food guide with "Tenderloin of Beef Wellington", cooked, left to cool and rolled in a pie crust. Similar dishes of different types of protein baked in pastry include salmon. Various vegetarian Wellington recipes, such as mushroom and beet Wellingtons exist. Food portal Shooter's sandwich List of beef dishes List of steak dishes
Steak
A steak is a meat sliced across the muscle fibers including a bone. Exceptions, in which the meat is sliced parallel to the fibers, include the skirt steak cut from the plate, the flank steak cut from the abdominal muscles, the silverfinger steak cut from the loin and includes three rib bones. In a larger sense, fish steaks, ground meat steaks, pork steak, many more varieties of steak are known. Steak is grilled, but can be pan-fried, it is grilled in an attempt to replicate the flavor of steak cooked over the glowing coals of an open fire. Steak can be cooked in sauce, such as in steak and kidney pie, or minced and formed into patties, such as hamburgers. Steaks are cut from grazing animals farmed, other than cattle, including bison, goat, kangaroo, ostrich, reindeer, turkey and zebu, as well as various types of fish salmon and large pelagic fish such as swordfish and marlin. For some meats, such as pork and mutton, veal, these cuts are referred to as chops; some cured meat, such as gammon, is served as steak.
Grilled portobello mushroom may be called mushroom steak, for other vegetarian dishes. Imitation steak is a food product, formed into a steak shape from various pieces of meat. Grilled fruits such as watermelon have been used as vegetarian steak alternatives; the word steak originates from the mid-15th century Scandinavian word steik, or stickna' in the Middle English dialect, along with the Old Norse word steikja. The Oxford English Dictionary's first reference is to "a thick slice of meat cut for roasting or grilling or frying, sometimes used in a pie or pudding. Subsequent parts of the entry, refer to "steak fish", which referred to "cod of a size suitable for cutting into steaks", "steak-raid", a custom among Scottish Highlanders of giving some cattle being driven through a gentleman's land to the owner. An early written usage of the word "stekys" comes from a 15th-century cookbook, makes reference to both beef or venison steaks. Livestock for meat to be used as steak cuts may be raised on a ranch.
The meat from various wild game may be used for steak cuts. Countries with enough suitable land for grazing animals, in particular cattle, have a history of production and culinary use of steak; such countries include Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom. In Asian countries, such as China and South Korea, steak is traditionally sliced and stir-fried and served in smaller amounts as part of a mixed dish. In Argentina, beef represents a large portion of the country's export market. A total of 11.8 million animals was harvested in 2010. The country has one of the largest consumptions of beef per capita worldwide, much of it is grilled steak. Beef steak consumption is described as part of the "Argentine national identity". In 2010, 244,000 cattle producers were in Argentina. In Argentina, steakhouses are referred to as parrillas. Portion sizes of steak dishes in Argentine restaurants tend to be large, with steaks weighing over 454 grams being commonplace. Asado is a traditional dish that includes steak and is the standard word for "grilled" in Argentina and other countries.
Asado is considered a national dish of the country. Domestic and international marketing of Australian beef is undertaken by Meat & Livestock Australia, a corporation which runs programs related to quality assurance, sustainable production, environmental considerations, through organizations such as Meat Standards Australia; the Irish agricultural beef market is a contributor to the economy of Ireland. A significant amount of Irish beef is exported to other countries, with over 50% going to the United Kingdom; the "Steak of Origin" competition has been run for a decade on behalf of the Beef+Lamb Corporation of New Zealand. It "aims to find the most tender and tasty sirloin steak" in the country. Criteria for judging claims to include tenderness, pH, marbling and percentage cooking loss", but while these data are collected for each entrant steak, only the shear force determines qualification to a tasting panel, at which objective taste from a panel determines the winner; the pH is used to disqualify entrants and neither the'marbling' or the cooking loss have any effect on the outcome of the competition at any stage.
Their parallel competition, which they run for lamb legs does take into account some of these other metrics when weighting the entrants for their ranking within the competition. According to a survey by trade magazine Caterer and Hotelkeeper, the most popular dinner menu in British restaurants in the 1980s included steak: prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau. Cattle breeds such as Hereford or Aberdeen Angus date back to the 1700s, farmers continue to raise cattle sired by registered pedigree bulls. Bullocks, which live outdoors year-round, grow as they would in their natural habitat producing a distinctly tender meat. Around 2,200,000 cattle are slaughtered for beef each year in the United Kingdom. In the United States, cuts of beef for retail sale include various beefsteaks, as well as stew meat and hamburger meat. In the U. S. circa 1956, about 24% of retail beef cuts were steaks. Beef production is the largest single agricultural venture in the United States, with 687,540 farms raising cattle and over a million in the production process, as of the 2007 Agriculture Census.
On average, a single farm raises about 50 cattle at a time, with 97% of the cattle farms classified as one of these small family far
Salt-cured meat
Salt-cured meat or salted meat is meat or fish preserved or cured with salt. Salting, either with dry salt or brine, was a common method of preserving meat until the middle of the 20th century, becoming less popular after the advent of refrigeration, it was called "junk" or "salt horse". Salt inhibits the growth of microorganisms by drawing water out of microbial cells through osmosis. Concentrations of salt up to 20% are required to kill most species of unwanted bacteria. Smoking used in the process of curing meat, adds chemicals to the surface of meat that reduce the concentration of salt required. Salted meat and fish are a staple of the diet in North Africa, Southern China, coastal Russia, in the Arctic. Salted meat was a staple of the mariner's diet in the Age of Sail, it was stored in barrels, had to last for months spent out of sight of land. The basic Royal Navy diet consisted of salted beef, salted pork, ship's biscuit, oatmeal, supplemented with smaller quantities of peas and butter. In 1938, Eric Newby found the diet on the tall ship Moshulu to consist entirely of salted meat.
Moshulu's lack of refrigeration left little choice as the ship made voyages which could exceed 100 days passage between ports. Bacon – A type of salt-cured pork Biltong – A form of dried, cured meat that originated in South Africa Corned beef – Salt-cured beef product Curing – Food preservation and flavoring processes based on drawing moisture out of the food by osmosis Jerky – Lean meat dried to prevent spoilage Salt pork – Salt-cured pork prepared from pork belly, or, more fatback. Pastrami – Meat preserved by partial drying, seasoning and steaming Dried and salted cod – Cod, preserved by drying after salting, one of the main preserved sources of protein for centuries around the Atlantic nations Ham – Pork from a leg cut, preserved by wet or dry curing, with or without smoking Jamón – Spanish word for ham. In English it refers to certain types of dry-cured ham from Spain Jellyfish as food Cecina Cured fish
Standing rib roast
A standing rib roast known as prime rib, is a cut of beef from the primal rib, one of the nine primal cuts of beef. While the entire rib section comprises ribs six through 12, a standing rib roast may contain anywhere from two to seven ribs, it is most roasted "standing" on the rib bones so that the meat does not touch the pan. An alternative cut removes the top end of the ribs for easier carving. Rib eye steaks are cut from a standing rib, boned with lesser muscles removed. While referred to as "prime rib", the USDA does not require the cut to be derived from USDA Prime grade beef. A slice of standing rib roast will include portions of the so-called "eye" of the rib, as well as the outer, fat-marbled muscle known as the "lip" or "cap"; the traditional preparation for a standing rib roast is to rub the outside of the roast with salt and seasonings and slow-roast with dry heat. It may be grilled. List of steak dishes Food portal The Meat Buyer's North American Meat Processors Association. Cooking For Engineers: Prime Rib
