Meat Glaze
Take away all the skin, sinew, and fat from the fillet, trim it a little, and cut it into eight evensized slices (fillets). Lard one side of each fillet with strips of bacon and strips of truffles.
Clean the carrot and turnip, cut them into slices, peel the onion and cut it into slices. Season the fillets with pepper and salt, and put them with the vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, and trimmings of bacon in a thickly buttered sauté-pan. Put it on the fire, and broil both sides of the fillets a little, then add the sherry and stock, cover with a lid or buttered paper, and braise them in the oven for about twenty minutes. Take out the fillets, put them on a dish and keep them hot. Remove the fat from the liquor, add the brown sauce, boil it gently for ten minutes, and strain.
Boil the Spanish onion in salted water. Peel the potatoes, cut the ends, scoop out the centre with a column cutter. Prepare a mixture with the Spanish onion finely chopped, the grated Parmesan cheese, the breadcrumbs, yolks of eggs, and one ounce of butter.
Fry the potatoes in hot fat or lard, drain and cool them, then fill them with the above stuffing.
Cut the tomatoes in slices, broil slightly in butter. Put a stuffed potato on the tomato, place them on a baking-sheet and bake for ten minutes.
Dish up the fillets on fancifully cut croûtes of fried bread. Brush over the surface of the fillets with dissolved meat glaze. Garnish round the dish with the stuffed potatoes and tomatoes, pour a little of the sauce round the dish, and serve the remainder in a sauce-boat.
Filets de Bœuf à la Garibaldi. i (Fillets of Beef à la Garibaldi.) Ingredients.
Two and a half pounds of Fillet of Beef (middle cut). About a quarter pound of Beef Marrow.
Three large Truffles.
Half a pound of Fat Bacon.
This is Filets de Bœuf à la Garibaldi — the page headings and the stray ingredient list have been shuffled in the original printing, so read the method as the whole of the dish and treat the ingredients that follow as the head of the same recipe. Quantities for the sherry, stock, brown sauce and vegetables are not given anywhere on the page, which is normal for a book written for cooks who already knew the proportions.
- What the dish actually isEight larded medallions from a beef fillet, braised briefly, glazed, and set on fried bread croûtes with a garnish of stuffed potato barrels on tomato slices. If the two and a half pounds of fillet listed after the method does belong with it, eight slices work out at roughly 5 oz each as bought, nearer 4 oz once skin, sinew and fat are taken away.
- Missing quantitiesThe book gives no quantities for the sherry, stock or brown sauce. A glass of sherry with enough stock to come part way up the meat, and brown sauce enough to sauce eight fillets, is a reasonable modern guess and nothing more — judge by the pan rather than by a number.
- "Broil both sides a little"The fillets are "broiled" in a thickly buttered sauté-pan set on the fire, so here the word plainly means to brown in fat rather than to grill. Sear the larded medallions in the pan on the stovetop, then add liquid and move to the oven.
- Braising temperatureThe book gives no oven temperature and no thickness for the slices. Twenty minutes covered in a moderate oven (350F as a modern equivalent) will take thick medallions well past rare; this is a Victorian doneness. If you want them pink, sear hard and give them eight to ten minutes, then rest while the sauce reduces.
- Buttered paperThe recipe allows either a lid or buttered paper. Paper laid over the pan holds moisture in while letting a little steam escape, where a tight lid traps it all.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a firm, syrupy jelly. Warm a spoonful and brush it on for the lacquered surface. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a reduced veal stock does the same job; a bouillon cube does not.
- Brown sauceEspagnole or demi-glace — a brown roux-based sauce built on veal or beef stock, made in advance. The ten-minute gentle boil is to marry it with the braising liquor and clarify it before straining, not to cook it from scratch.
- Larding, and trufflesLarding needs a larding needle to draw strips of fat bacon and truffle through the flesh; a thin boning knife and patience will do. Fresh black truffles are extremely expensive and preserved ones are milder — a small tin of truffle peelings inserted the same way gives the look and some of the perfume.
- Column cutterAn apple-corer or a round cutter of about an inch. Cut cylinders from large peeled potatoes, trim the ends flat, scoop out the centre, fry until just tender and coloured, then fill with the onion, Parmesan, crumb and yolk mixture and bake the ten minutes the recipe gives; no temperature is stated, but a hot oven of about 400F will set the stuffing.
The book belongs to the era when a dish took its name from a garnish and a garnish took its name from whoever was in the newspapers — Garibaldi, who died in 1882, lent his name to biscuits, a blouse, a fish and any number of restaurant plates in Britain, where his 1864 visit drew enormous crowds. Named beef fillets like this were the workhorse of the professional entrée course: a costly cut, larded and braised so it could be finished and glazed to order, then dressed with two contrasting garnishes and a sauce sent separately in a boat. Whatever the cause of the mangled headings and the ingredient list stranded at the end of the method — a page break or the scan as much as anything in the printer's copy — the reader of these late-Victorian compendia was plainly expected to supply proportions, temperatures and timings from training rather than from the page.