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Beef, with Sauce Espagnole
Lard a piece of the inside fillet (from four to five pounds will be a nice size) and lay it--seasoned with salt and pepper--in vinegar for ten or twelve hours. Put it immediately to roast before a quick fire, baste well with butter and the drippings from the meat. When done, glaze over the top, and serve with the above sauce (see various recipes for SPANISH SAUCE). Time to roast, quarter of an hour to the pound.
A larded, vinegar-marinated beef fillet meant for spit-roasting before an open fire. The one thing to ignore is the timing: fifteen minutes to the pound will take a whole tenderloin far past edible.
- Cut"Inside fillet" is the beef tenderloin, trimmed; at 4-5 lb that is roughly an entire trimmed tenderloin rather than a short centre cut, with the chain and silverskin removed. Fold and tie the thin tail under so the roast is of even thickness.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of pork back fat through the meat with a larding needle, which no longer needs doing for flavour so much as for insurance against a dry, very lean cut. Barding — wrapping the fillet in a sheet of caul fat or thin sliced fatback and tying it — achieves the same end with less equipment.
- The vinegar bathTen or twelve hours in vinegar was probably as much about tenderising and keeping as about taste, though the recipe does not say. Do it in the refrigerator, not on a bench, and dilute the vinegar with oil or wine unless you want a distinctly sharp, almost sauerbraten character; straight vinegar will also grey the surface of the meat.
- "A quick fire"A brisk, hot fire; the nearest oven equivalent is somewhere around 450F, though the book gives no temperatures at all. The original assumes a roasting jack turning the joint in front of open flames, with a dripping pan beneath; a rotisserie attachment or a very hot oven with the roast raised on a rack over a pan of drippings both stand in.
- TimingQuarter of an hour to the pound gives 60-75 minutes, which would ruin a tenderloin. In a very hot oven expect roughly 25-40 minutes total and go by a thermometer: 125F at the centre for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, then rest 15 minutes before carving.
- GlazingTo glaze is to brush the surface with reduced, gelatinous brown stock — meat glaze, glace de viande — which sets to a shine as it cools. A few spoonfuls of the espagnole itself, boiled down until syrupy, will do.
- Sauce espagnoleThe classic brown sauce: brown roux, veal or beef stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered long and skimmed. Cassell's cross-reference assumes you already have some; a good demi-glace bought or made ahead is the practical route, as the sauce takes hours longer than the beef.
- YieldA 4-5 lb trimmed fillet serves eight to ten as a main course.
Sauce espagnole is one of the mother sauces codified in French professional kitchens in the nineteenth century, and its name has been argued over for as long as it has existed — the usual traditional explanation is that Spanish cooks in France introduced the tomato and the deeply browned base, though nobody has documented it. The book is teaching the reader that a great roast is finished with a made sauce prepared separately, in the French manner, rather than the English habit of gravy from the pan. The vinegar steeping is the older and more domestic element, and may be a survival from the days when a marinade did double duty as a preservative; its presence beside a fashionable French sauce is a fair picture of a late-Victorian kitchen: continental technique laid over inherited household practice.