Cooked Beef

[Translator’s note: The process described by the verb zharit’—the searing or cooking at high temperature with butter or fat but without liquids—is often translated as “frying,” but is really a definition by exclusion and can mean almost anything as long as the meat is not cooked in a liquid. Possibilities include frying, grilling, broiling, roasting, baking, and spit-roasting. Under this same heading, however, Molokhovets also included recipes (18 out of 49, or 37% of the total) that call for cooking the beef in a liquid, either on top of the stove or in the oven. Some of these dishes require an initial or final browning, but others do not. Only eight recipes in this section (16% of the total) involve frying in the limited English sense. “Cooked” beef may sound like a very feeble translation, but I can think of no other word in English that is comprehensive enough to cover all the processes described in the recipes that follow.]