The first time someone in the Middle Kingdoms series runs across this dish, he starts salivating at the scent of it, but never gets any (poor baby). He gets this instead—possibly because of his concerns about his available cash: who knows?— but I still feel sorry for him. Sometimes you discover you’ve accidentally tormented one of your characters instead of doing it on purpose. 

It’s one of the recipes listed as part of this project that’s been on my mind for the longest, but has been driven into the background because others were, frankly, easier to get to grips with. Late this last week, though, local discoveries pushed it to the fore.

One of the issues that had backgrounded the basic recipe has had to do with the raw materials needed: specifically, the beef. Perfectly ordinary beef available in the Irish market (most of it Hereford and Angus, with a sprinkling of Galloway and Piedmontese) would probably have done the trick. 

I had, however, painted myself into a bit of a corner with the breed details mentioned in the Steldene steak pie recipe. Ideally, if I was going to make the signature local roast beef recipe referred to ever so fleetingly in that chapter of The Door Into Fire, it needed to be by using meat that came from some kind of cow smaller and more local, and more evocative of the area’s cattle—tough, used to poor pasturage and not in need of much coddling. “Maybe,” I’d think when I’d glance at the pie recipe, “I could get away with Kerry beef or something.” If you can find some without having to run halfway across the country, the backbrain would comment skeptically.

Then, without warning, an opportunity opened up. Having gone down to the local shopping town some days back to grab (among other necessities) a loaf of the artisanal sourdough bread that the town’s craft butcher carries on behalf of a local baker, I spotted something different in the cold case.

They had started carrying Dexter beef.

…This takes a little explaining. Dexters are small, short-legged cows: apparently evolved to handle poor and sparse grazing to best advantage, and as good for milk as they are for meat. They sort of came out of the Irish version of nowhere in the middle of the 1800s, and for a long time were thought to be a branch of the Kerry cow breed. But they weren’t: they were their own breed, apparently descended from an older Celtic strain. They were widely exported, and (worldwide) are not a threatened breed. But somehow or other—possibly because they weren’t large enough to make Loads Of Meat and be sufficiently commercial—they nearly vanished from Ireland by the early 1900s. Only the fortuitous preservation of the breed elsewhere in the world kept them from going extinct. Most other places they’re designated as “not at risk”: but here they’re still rated “at risk/critical”.

This is changing, though. They’re being bred again (partly because they’re “greener” than other cattle in terms of the way they use their grazing). And here was their beef in my local butcher!

And lying there in front of me was, honest to Bóann the fair, a chunk of beef filet/fillet (filet mignon as we’d say in the US) of Dexter beef.

It was only a little thing: 600g-ish / a pound and a half. Nonetheless I bought it immediately, before someone else should see it. (And because a larger piece would probably have required me to investigate going into escrow. It was not cheap… but quality experimentation often isn’t.)

So I brought the filet home and spent a while staring at it, and thinking about poor Herewiss’s never-eaten roast beef.

The sting in the tail of this particular recipe was going to be that—regardless of what this piece of beef had cost me, and what the local recipe looked like—the basic take, for the website, needed to be built so as to reflect not being a big deal in a country inn, away by itself in the border country at the south end of Darthen but up against the Steldene border (ill-defined as that was). The terrain there has for centuries favored mixed grazing of sheep and cows… despite the nasty presence of a fair number of savagely predatory and monstrous Fyrd until Arlen had a king again, and the restored royal magics started once more to manage the wildlife of the Realms as had always been their purpose. When Herewiss wandered into the Crow and Cheese pub in Havering Slides, though, the restoration of any kind of king in Arlen was still a longed-for but distant phantom in an ill-divined future. But beef? Plenty of that around. (And pork, too. Where people can survive, pigs can too.)

…Anyway, in this universe, I now had an interesting problem. Normally when I’m auditioning a recipe for the FACOTMK site, I start with a simple version, using normally unremarkable ingredients vaguely similar to what the locals would be eating in one of the Four Realms. Then I work up to more developed versions with higher-end ingredients. But this time I was, it seemed, going to be coming at it backwards. At one level at least, I had ingredients that were at the top of the availability scale.

Additionally, there was one ingredient that I was missing completely.

Caul fat, or just plain “caul” (please ignore the Wikipedia image, it’s dreadful) is an interesting ingredient… one that (as my butcher agreed with me) now either gets thrown away at the slaughterhouse level, or rendered down with various other animal fats to be sold off for assorted industrial uses. It’s essentially a delicate, often near-transparent membrane veined with fat. In various areas of traditional meat cookery, caul either gets used to hold together ingredients that seem likely to fall apart (various sausages, meatball-like dishes, etc.) or to help keep roasting meats moist, while also kind of melting away and quietly vanishing in the roasting process. This is the way caul is normally used in a lot of tavern cookery in the Realms, as it works very well in pub ovens that may have been baking bread in the morning but are working more on residual heat in the later hours of the day—in what we might now think of as “low-&-slow” mode.

And that said: finding it in modern Ireland is a pain in the butt. Yes, there are places from which I could order it in the UK. But since they are no longer in the EU, and shipping from there to here has become seriously screwed up as a result—especially as regards fresh foods, or foods that need chilling between there and here—I’d have an issue on my hands if I wanted to do the roast beef as originally conceived. (Because caul was always in the picture: or at least, the picture in my head.)

(By the way, here’s a Guardian article with a better image of caul. It always looks a little iffy until you get used to it. But some of the pics out there are just gross.)

…So where we we? (Oh yeah: roast beef with no caul.)

A workaround (not an ideal one, but okay enough, and Darthene/Steldene cooks are likely enough to have used it when they couldn’t get caul) is to wrap the beef in very, very thin-sliced bacon. That in its own way is a bit of a novelty in Ireland, but our butcher carries it, and provided me with some.

So the plan was as follows:  Roast this really nice filet of beef wrapped in bacon: because even though it’s way too high-class for a country pub in the Darthene/Steldene borders, it’s for me, and bacon’s what there is. (Peter would also have loved this, I think. He would’ve wanted his more toward the medium-well end of things, but that was how he rolled.) (The French have a derogatory term for this, which they were always charmed that he both knew and laughed about, when we were out that way.)

…Then when I’m up in town on Wednesday for what I suspect is going to be the first of a series of annual MRIs on My Wee Little Brain Tumor (please don’t panic, it’s nothing serious until they tell me it is: more data here…), I’ll do what some folks have suggested and hit one or two (or three) Asian groceries to see if they have some caul. They may be able to help me out.

Meantime, here’s what ensued with the Dexter filet. I wound up having a day’s frustration with my two Meater roasting probes (the older of which deigned to sync up with its app yesterday, but wouldn’t do it today: the newer of which, that had never before worked, suddenly turning kindly and syncing up correctly today. Go figure). I was a little concerned over the possibility of overcooking a pretty expensive piece of meat, and was feeling very warmly toward the concept of having some assistance in not overdoing it.

So here’s what the little chunk of filet looked like.

…Now the flattish shape made it immediately plain to me that if I wanted to roast this with the Helpful Probe inside, I was going to need to roll it and tie it up. (Ooo, kinky!) So this was done. 

…Then it was oiled a bit and rolled onto the ground-out salt, pepper and coarse-ground allspice. (That being a spice they’re big on in the Realms.)

It was then seared with some more oil in a frying pan and allowed to cool down a bit…

…and after the cutting board had kind of been paved with bacon, the little filet roast-to-be was placed on it and had the bacon wrapped around it: and afterwards, tied in place.

(You can see how I put it up on a trivet in the roasting pan, as I didn’t want the bacon to come to grief with the bottom of the pan.)

…And then it went into the oven. The Meater probe told me when the roast hit the desired internal temp, but I gave it ten minutes more at a much higher heat to brown up the outside a little. (The recipe I was adapting from, BTW, was this one from Ina Garten. I was looking for a slower cooking speed, as I was uncertain what a higher heat might do to so small a chunk of meat.)

And here’s how it looked when it came out.

…Adorable.🙂

I let it rest for the guts of half an hour, then sliced it.

…Now that may look overly rare to some folk (depending on your screen’s color temperature…), but this honestly tasted, and felt, medium rare. (Leaving me with questions: does Dexter beef cook, I don’t know, darker than other kinds? Something I’m going to have to discuss with my butcher…)

Anyway, this was my dinner. Some of that beef, with a baked potato out of its shell, and some peas.) (I’m still laughing at that one pea just sitting there. I left it there while taking the shot. Sometimes you play the ball as it lies, you know?)

…So, the plan for next week:  (a) Acquire a somewhat LESS expensive roast beef cut, suitable for a pub in a smallish country town. Maybe tenderloin. (b) See if some caul can be acquired. (c) Come at this again and see if it can be made both more photogenic and more regionally accurate.

…Meanwhile: this is going to make the MOST spectacular roast beef sandwiches.🙂

(and adding:) (d): Run up to Polonez while in town and grab a jar of Polish horseradish. The Coleman’s horseradish isn’t really up to much.