Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rump Steak, Stewed, with Piquant Sauce
Rump Steak, Stewed, with Piquant Sauce
Take a pound and a half of tender steak an inch thick, and fry this in hot fat till it is lightly and equally browned. Take it up, put it into a saucepan which has been twice rubbed across with garlic, and pour over it a quarter of a pint of good gravy. Add the strained juice of a lemon, a tea-spoonful of grated horse-radish, a tea-spoonful of finely-minced shallot, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a tea-spoonful of moist-sugar, half a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, and a little pepper and salt. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents stew gently for an hour. Peel and mince finely two small mushrooms, and a truffle, if it can be had. If not, use four mushrooms. Simmer them quickly in two table-spoonfuls of vinegar for ten minutes. Add them to the steak, simmer all gently together for half an hour longer, and serve. Time, nearly two hours. Probable cost, rump steak, 1s. 4d. to 1s. 6d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian braise dressed as a steak dish. The single decision that determines whether it works is the cut: an inch-thick steak stewed for ninety minutes will not stay tender unless it comes from a cut built for slow cooking.
- Choose the cut for the method, not the nameModern rump and sirloin are trimmed and aged for fast, hot cooking; ninety minutes of stewing turns them grey and stringy. Use chuck, blade or thick flank in a single 1.5 lb piece an inch thick, and the collagen will soften into the sauce as intended.
- A quarter of a pintIn imperial measure that is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. It is a deliberately scant amount, meant to reduce to a coating sauce rather than a braising liquid, so use a lidded pan just large enough to hold the meat and check partway that it has not cooked dry.
- "Good gravy"Not a thickened flour gravy but the strong brown meat stock a Victorian kitchen kept on hand. Well-reduced beef stock is the closest equivalent; a commercial stock cube will read as salty and thin against the lemon and vinegar.
- Moist sugar and mixed mustardMoist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar. Mixed mustard means mustard already made up with liquid, as opposed to dry powder, so any smooth prepared mustard serves.
- The garlic rubRubbing a cut clove twice across the pan is the whole garlic content of the dish, and it is meant to be a trace rather than a flavour. If you want it to register, a single crushed clove added with the gravy is more honest than over-rubbing.
- Mushrooms and truffleTwo small mushrooms plus a truffle, or four mushrooms in its place, is a very small quantity by modern habit; the vinegar simmer is what makes them count. Chestnut or brown mushrooms give more of the earthiness the truffle was supplying.
- Deglaze the frying panThe recipe moves the browned steak to a second, garlic-rubbed pan and leaves the fond behind. Rinse the frying pan out with the measured gravy and pour that in, or you lose the best of the browning.
- ServingSufficient for three or four, as stated. Carve across the grain into thick slices, spoon the reduced sauce over, and serve with something plain and starchy — mashed potato or plain boiled rice — since the sauce is sharp with lemon, vinegar, horseradish and mustard.
The name points to the French family of sauces piquantes, sharp reduction sauces built on vinegar, shallot and mustard, which English cookery had largely absorbed by the mid-nineteenth century. Cassell's appeared in the 1870s and was reissued for decades, aimed squarely at middle-class households that wanted French-inflected dishes without a French cook, and the recipe shows the compromise: the aromatics are measured out in teaspoonfuls, the truffle is offered and then immediately excused, and the cost is quoted to the penny per pound. The instruction to rub the saucepan with garlic rather than add any fits a broader Victorian British reticence about garlic, treated as a flavour to be hinted at rather than eaten. The practice of frying a steak and then stewing it for an hour and a half also reflects the beef of the period, which was generally leaner, tougher and less consistently butchered than what a supermarket now sells under the same name.