For years I have made a bit of a thing of usually buying fore rib when we have beef - and making a bit of a fuss when the butcher - or his supplier - takes it into his head to go in for trimming or chining. I wanted the real thing.
But just recently, I fell for a joint of beef from Waitrose described as boned beef rib, one and a half kilos of it. Didn't look much on the slab, but I did get a special bag, a relative of the bags in which they sell their kippers, from the counter adjacent. The same counter hand does both, which seems to mean a lot of hand washing.
Plus a couple of bits of short rib for the gravy. I don't suppose the bones from my joint ever left the butchery line in some shed somewhere far from Epsom.
Started the gravy the following afternoon, that is to say Friday. Bones, onions, carrots, parsnip (elderly) and celery. Gave it around five hours, bashing it a bit with the potato masher from time to time, and putting it to strain in a colander at around 21:00.
Put the decent debris with some of the resultant stock through the blender. Some of the product destined to thicken the gravy, some destined for broth.
Moving onto the sums, 1.6kg equals 3.5lbs. Radiation suggests 60+10+20=90, say an hour and a half. 190°C seems to be the form these days.
Joint in the near cold oven at 11:25. Oiled, as not much fat to be seen outside, although it turned out that there was a good fat vein of fat inside.
Skimmed the refrigerated stock, with the fat destined for the roux.
Attended to the veg. Somewhere along the way, BH attended to the damson pie to follow.
Plated and put back into the oven at 12:40. Nothing much had emerged when I speared it. Turned the oven off shortly after. On the table at 13:05.
After some cutting. Most of the juices added to the gravy.
On the plate. Very good it was too, and rather different from our usual on-the-bone joint. Much more like the rather good beef noticed at the Wigmore at reference 1.
We missed out on gravy dipping, there not being any white bread to hand, but th gravy was pretty good too - although I think I would omit the parsnip next time. Its taste was too strong against the other items on the card. Surprising how far one small parsnip went, and how its flavour persisted.
I associate to today to once making the mistake of adding parsnip to lentil and bacon soup. That did not work at all well.
A close up. As at the Wigmore, not as raw as it looked. I liked the loose texture.
Damson pie, with custard, to follow.
On the plate. You need the pastry and custard to cut the damsons a bit, which would be a bit strong neat. I think the French do much the same sort of thing, but upside down. Line the tin with pastry, damsons on top, pour custard - or some fancy French version thereof, perhaps what we call confectioners' custard - on top. Served cold rather than hot.
A couple of days later the cold version, taken with salad, with special potatoes. Beef still going strong, still tasting good.
The strawberries to follow did not look that great, but they tasted OK, certainly on this first outing. But one could see why they might need cream and sugar to tart them up a bit as they aged, not necessary on this occasion.
By the Wednesday, down to white rolls from Waitrose. Pretty good they were too, with a little butter to soften the beef. The day, as it happens of the underwhelming but Heath Robinson'd eclipse; the day also when we polished off the gravy, all noticed at reference 3.
There was also the matter of the broth, taken as I recall, with a little Bastides saucisson, also from Waitrose. But I forget which day that was.
PS 1: when I ask Gemini about dry aging, he offers a long story. In brief, dry aging is hanging the beef, swinging free, in a climate controlled box, usually with a window, so that customers can admire it. Ginger Pig in Borough Market has a box of this sort, empty when we last went past. The restaurant at King's Place has one.
Wet aging is jointing and shrink wrapping more or less immediately after slaughter, and then refrigerating. Important advantages of this last are less weight loss (to evaporation) and less weight lost (to trimming on the dry bits). The former tastes better, but the latter is mostly what supermarkets do.
Aging, inter alia, gives time for a bit of flavour development and a bit of pre-digestion. Easier on the human stomach. Enzymes rather than microbes - although you would certainly get them too in an old fashioned game larder.
If you are being even more foodie, you add Himalayan salt. Gemini explains that this is not to flavour the meat, rather to help with humidity control. Also the punters think it sounds good.
Some of which is to be found at reference 2.
PS 2: wondering whether and how to apostrophise 'Bastides', I looked them up again and tracked them down to reference 4. The family name in question is 'Tournois', while 'bastide' is the name of a sort of fortified town, common in southwest France during the wars of the 14th and 15th centuries. Marauding mercenaries, some of them English, everywhere. So name of a brand, rather than a name of a person or even a company. More an adjective than a noun, so no apostrophe.
Larousse agrees with me about 'bastide', but, oddly, Littré gives a quite different meaning. I then look up Wikipedia at reference 5, where I find the whole story is rather more complicated than I had realised.
Gemini more or less agrees with me, with a few qualifications, in the course of a short essay on the subject of apostrophes. His summary being: 'Style guides (such as Chicago, AP, and standard corporate copy standards) generally recommend treating brand names as attributive nouns to keep product copy clean and avoid awkward punctuation around final s sounds'. Attributive nouns are not adjectives, but they do behave a bit like them. An example of the difficulty of corralling a live language in fixed, simple rules.
PS 3: there is an advertisement in my mail this morning suggesting that I might like to join the submarine service, an advertisement which leads to the slickly produced recruitment website at reference 6. I imagine the Google advertising people know my age, so perhaps the Navy did not pay enough to get these adverts sensibly filtered. Did anything that I did prompt its arrival? Yesterday's interest in belaying pins?
References
Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/d960.html.
Reference 2: https://www.theagingroom.com/.
Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/big-day.html.
Reference 4: https://www.sacor.fr/. 'Notre entreprise, les Salaisons et Conserves du Rouergue (Sacor), a été créée en 1962 à Villefranche-de-Rouergue, une bastide médiévale d’envergure du département de l’Aveyron...'.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastide.
Reference 6: https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/careers/services/submarine-service.
Group search key: 20260808.
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