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POTATOES, BEEF STEAKS WITH (French fashion)
Take some thin slices of rump of beef, flatten them, and season with a little salt, pepper, etc. Dip these slices into a little butter, that the gravy may not drop out whilst broiling. Have some parsley chopped very fine and mixed with butter, salt, pepper, lemon, etc. When the beef steaks are done, put under them the above ingredients, and all around fried potatoes of a fine brown colour. Glaze the beef steaks; you may serve them with different sauces, as mushroom, oyster, and tomato.
This is bifteck aux pommes frites with maître d'hôtel butter, written for a coal grill and a pan of dripping. Almost all of it translates directly; the vocabulary is what needs unpicking.
- "Dip into a little butter"The butter is melted, and the slices are brushed or turned through it rather than battered in it. The recipe gives its purpose: to keep the gravy from dropping out while broiling, so the steaks should go straight onto the heat while still coated.
- Thin slices, high heatRump cut thin and flattened cooks in two or three minutes a side at most. Get the grill or a cast-iron pan properly hot before the meat goes near it; a moderate heat will grey the surface and dry the interior before any colour develops.
- The parsley butterParsley, butter, salt, pepper and lemon juice worked together cold is maître d'hôtel butter. Make it in advance, roll it in paper and chill it firm, then slice discs onto the hot plate so it melts into the resting juices rather than turning to oil.
- "Glaze the beef steaks"In a Victorian kitchen this meant brushing with reduced meat glaze (glace de viande) for gloss. A spoonful of well-reduced beef stock, or simply the buttery pan juices brushed over, does the same job.
- Fried potatoes"Of a fine brown colour" means properly fried, not pale. Whether you cut them as chips or as thin rounds, dry them well and fry in two stages if you want the interior soft and the outside crisp.
- Order of workThe potatoes take longer than the meat and hold better. Fry them first, keep them hot and salt them at the last moment; the steaks are the thing that must not wait.
- The alternative saucesMushroom, oyster and tomato were all familiar Victorian steak sauces. The recipe offers them as options ("you may serve them with different sauces"); whether they were meant in place of the parsley butter or alongside it is not stated.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Reckon on roughly 6 oz of trimmed rump and a good handful of potatoes per person, with about 1 oz of parsley butter for two.
Cassell's calls this "French fashion" for good reason: steak with fried potatoes was the emblematic dish of the nineteenth-century Parisian bistro and caf o have have taken up it along with the parsley butter that generally travels under the name ma tre d'h tel.