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BEEF, RIB STEAKS (a la Bordelaise)
Cut out a thick steak from between the bones; soak it in salad-oil, and season with salt and pepper. Broil on each side for five minutes. Boil a small young vegetable marrow, cut it into half-inch slices, glaze, and lay them, when made quite hot, over the steak. Pour some Bordelaise sauce over all, and serve very hot. Time to boil the marrow, ten to twenty minutes.
A plain grilled rib steak dressed up by two things a Victorian kitchen had on hand and most modern ones do not: a pot of meat glaze and a proper Bordelaise. Sort those out and the rest is fifteen minutes' work.
- Vegetable marrow is a squashDespite sitting next to a sauce traditionally finished with bone marrow, the marrow here is the vegetable: a mature summer squash, the same species as the courgette. A large courgette or a young pattypan is the closest supermarket substitute. The recipe's ten to twenty minutes appears to apply to boiling the marrow whole before it is sliced; if you cut it into half-inch slices first, it will need considerably less — just until tender, or the slices collapse.
- "Glaze" means glace de viandeTo glaze the slices is to brush them with reduced meat stock so they take on a shine. A few spoonfuls of well-reduced beef stock, or a good commercial demi-glace let down with water, does the job. Warm the slices in it rather than boiling them again.
- Bordelaise sauceCassell's assumes you will turn to its own entry. In brief: red wine reduced with shallot, thyme and cracked pepper, thickened with a brown sauce or demi-glace, and classically finished with poached diced bone marrow. Make it before the steak, since it wants a good half hour of reduction.
- "Cut out a thick steak from between the bones"This reads as a steak cut from between the ribs of a whole rib roast, so effectively boneless. The recipe specifies only that it be thick; a thick-cut ribeye is the nearest modern equivalent.
- The oil soakSalad-oil is plain olive or neutral oil. Twenty to thirty minutes is plenty; the point is to keep the meat from sticking to the bars and to help it colour, not to marinate it. Salt at the same time, but scrape off surface oil before the steak meets the fire or it will flare.
- Five minutes a sideThat assumes a fierce fire close to the meat. Under a domestic broiler at full heat, or on a cast-iron grill pan, five minutes a side on a 1 1/2-inch steak lands near medium-rare — check for 130F at the centre and rest it five minutes before saucing.
- YieldOne thick rib steak of this size serves two, carved across the grain onto hot plates with the marrow slices and sauce spooned over.
À la bordelaise in nineteenth-century professional cookery most often referred to the red-wine sauce of Bordeaux finished with poached bone marrow, though the term also covered a white-wine version and garnishes of cèpes or artichokes. Cassell's, which appears to have been assembled for English households wanting French technique without a French chef, files this among the short garnish variations under BEEF — a page of instructions that only work if you have already read the sauce entry, which is how the whole dictionary is built. The vegetable marrow is the English contribution and the accident of the page: a cheap, prolific kitchen-garden squash that grew in quantity through late summer, glazed here to give it enough savour to sit beside the beef. Its appearance alongside a sauce named for bone marrow is coincidence, not wordplay, though the two senses of the word were as confusable then as they are now.