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BEEF, RIB STEAKS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Prepare steaks as in preceding recipe; put some Maitre d'Hotel butter on a hot dish (see MAITRE D'HOTEL SAUCE); lay the steaks upon it and glaze over the top. Time, ten minutes to broil. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Two pounds sufficient for four persons.
A three-line finishing note rather than a full recipe: Cassell assumes you have already read the preceding steak entry and the entry for maître d'hôtel sauce. What matters here is the butter and the heat of the dish.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — roughly 4 oz butter to 2 tablespoons parsley and the juice of half a lemon. It is not cooked; it melts under the steaks and becomes the sauce.
- The hot dish is the pointThe butter goes on the serving dish first and the meat on top of it, so the platter must be genuinely hot — warm it in the oven or with boiling water. On a cold plate the butter sits in a greasy pool instead of emulsifying with the meat juices.
- "Glaze over the top"In Victorian professional usage 'glazing' usually meant brushing with glace de viande, reduced meat stock set to a syrup, for shine; here it may equally mean simply spooning over more of the melted maitre d'hotel butter. Either a spoonful of well-reduced beef stock or the butter itself does the job.
- Rib steaksCut from the fore rib — a bone-in rib steak or ribeye. Cassell's 2 lb for four people implies steaks of about 8 oz each, which is modest by current portioning if the bone is included.
- Ten minutes to broilThe recipe does not say how thick the steak is or how it is cooked; ten minutes would suit a steak of about an inch over a clear fire on a gridiron, turned once, and would leave it short of well done. Under a modern grill at full heat or in a heavy pan, timing varies with thickness and heat, so go by an instant-read thermometer (about 130F/54C for medium-rare) rather than the clock.
- Rest before saucingNot mentioned in the original, but let the steaks sit three or four minutes before they meet the butter, or the juices flood the dish and thin the sauce.
- Probable cost1s. per pound is a price note for a household ordering from a butcher in the 1870s-80s, of no use as a conversion. It appears throughout the book so a cook could cost a menu in advance.
Maitre d'hotel butter -- butter, parsley, lemon, seasoning -- is among the plainest of the French compound butters, and takes its name from the household steward rather than the chef. Cassell's, published for middle-class households rather than professionals, uses it freely as a dressing for grilled meat and fish: no stock reduction, no thickening, nothing that needs a saucier's attention, just a flavoured butter melting under something hot. The instruction to glaze the top is the one gesture toward restaurant practice here, where a pot of reduced meat glaze would have been kept standing by. The recipe's brevity, and its reliance on cross-references to two other entries, is characteristic of the dictionary format: the book was arranged for looking things up mid-work, not for reading through.