Marrow Fat
Trim the piece of fillet and cut it into very small fillets. Grill or broil them in a little butter for about six minutes-they must not be cooked through-press them between two boards and cool.
Cut the liver into slices, and mince the bacon coarsely. Melt a little butter; add the shalots, and fry a golden colour; then add the bacon and liver, and toss over the fire for about five minutes; season to taste, and put it on a plate and let it cool. When cold pound it in a mortar with the tongue and foie-gras; add the panada and egg; mix well, season to taste, and rub through a fine sieve. Spread one side of each fillet thickly with this farce and brush over with egg. Stuff as many stoned olives as there are fillets with the same farce.
Cook the fillets for a few minutes in the oven; then brush over with meat glaze. Put the olives in a buttered sauté-pan in the oven, and cook them for six minutes. Blanch the marrow (cut into very small rounds); drain and warm it up in the sauce Bordelaise.
Dish up the fillets on a potato border; put them back in the oven to heat them thoroughly.
Put a stuffed olive and a round of marrow on each fillet; sauce over and round with well-reduced Bordelaise sauce, and serve.
This is a garnished beef fillet dish in the late-Victorian grand manner — small steaks masked with a liver-and-foie-gras forcemeat, finished with poached marrow and Bordelaise. The title and the "Fish" heading are a shelving error in the book; nothing here is fish. As is common in professional manuals of the period, the ingredient quantities lived in a separate list, so treat the method as a blueprint rather than a self-contained recipe.
- The hinge: the marrowBeef marrow must be blanched gently — slipped into barely simmering salted water for a couple of minutes — then drained and warmed in the sauce off the boil. Let it boil and it melts to fat, leaving the sauce greasy and the rounds gone.
- PanadaA thick binding paste, usually flour or breadcrumb cooked with milk or stock until it leaves the sides of the pan, then cooled. It is what keeps the pounded liver farce from weeping; without it the stuffing breaks in the oven.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A spoonful of well-reduced demi-glace does the same job of giving the fillets a lacquered surface.
- Sauce BordelaiseRed wine and shallots reduced hard, finished with demi-glace. In this period the sauce was very often the vehicle for the marrow, so keep it thick — "well-reduced" means it coats a spoon.
- Pressing between two boardsAfter the initial grilling, the fillets are weighted flat so they cool into even discs that take the farce cleanly and reheat at the same rate. A tray with a couple of cans on it does the job; chill them fully before spreading.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe simply says 'in the oven' and gives no temperature. The fillets are already part-cooked, so the second stint is for heating through and setting the farce, not for cooking the beef.
- Potato borderAlmost certainly duchesse potato — riced potato bound with egg yolk and butter — piped as a ring on the serving dish and lightly coloured, though the recipe says only 'a potato border'. It exists to hold the sauce in and can be piped ahead and browned while the fillets heat.
- Stoned olivesPitted olives, stuffed with the same farce; large green ones are the usual choice. Rinse brined olives first or their salt will fight the reduced sauce and the glaze.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Assembly is one small fillet, one olive and one round of marrow apiece, since the method says to stuff 'as many stoned olives as there are fillets'.
This belongs to the vocabulary of the grande cuisine that English professional cooks were teaching in the late nineteenth century, when cookery schools in London and the great house kitchens worked in French terms — panada, farce, glace de viande, Bordelaise — and expected a pupil to know each without explanation. The pairing of beef fillet with poached marrow and a red-wine shallot sauce is generally traced to Bordeaux, where the sauce takes its name, and by the end of the century à la bordelaise was shorthand across menus for exactly this: marrow, wine, shallot. What dates the dish is not the sauce but the layering — a steak is grilled, chilled, pressed, coated with a pounded liver and foie-gras forcemeat, glazed, ringed with piped potato and topped with a stuffed olive. That is kitchen-brigade cooking, built on the assumption that stock, glaze and sauce base were already standing on the stove and that several pairs of hands were available at service.