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One Spanish Onion (Two pickled Walnuts)
Two pickled Walnuts.
Two tablespoonfuls of Mushroom Ketchup.
One dessertspoonful of Walnut Ketchup.
One teaspoonful of Worcester Sauce.
One dozen Oysters.
One ounce of Butter.
One pound of Fillet Steak. Half an ounce of Flour.
Mix the butter and flour together in a stewpan ; peel and chop up the onion, cut up the walnuts, put them into the stewpan, also the ketchup and Worcester sauce. Lay the steak on these and let it stew for an hour, turning it every twenty minutes; it must not boil. Just before serving, put in the oysters, bearded, with their liquor strained through a fine strainer.
Filets de Bœuf à la Pompadour.
Ingredients.
Three pounds of Fillet of Beef.
A Victorian stewed steak, heavily seasoned with the store-cupboard ketchups of the period and finished with oysters. The transcription runs two entries together: the ingredient list is headed by the onion and steak, and the final line — Filets de Bœuf à la Pompadour. Three pounds of Fillet of Beef — belongs to the next recipe, not to this one.
- The hinge: it must not boilThe instruction is explicit and it is the whole method. Held at a bare shiver for an hour, a thick steak stays succulent; at a rolling boil the muscle fibres tighten and the meat goes grey and stringy. Use the lowest burner setting and keep the pan covered. (The original gives no oven and no temperature.)
- The missing quantity of steakNo weight for the steak appears in this fragment; the list begins mid-flow and the method refers to 'the steak' as if already named, so the quantity may have stood just above. On the aromatics here — one onion, two walnuts, three tablespoonfuls of ketchup — something in the region of 1.5 to 2 lb of rump or thick skirt would suit, cut in one piece so it can be turned three times.
- Oysters need two minutes, not twentyThey go in at the very end for good reason. Slip them into the finished sauce off the heat or over the barest warmth until the edges just ruffle. Anything longer and a dozen oysters shrink to rubber.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilled gill around the oyster. Nineteenth-century cooks pulled it off because it can be gritty and tough in cooked dishes; with modern cultivated oysters it is optional, and the strained liquor matters far more — it is the salt and the depth of the sauce.
- Mushroom and walnut ketchupNeither is tomato ketchup. Both are thin, dark, salty brown liquids in the soy-sauce register; mushroom ketchup is still made commercially, walnut ketchup less so. A dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons. If you cannot find walnut ketchup, more mushroom ketchup with a few drops of anchovy essence sits in the same place.
- Pickled walnutsGreen walnuts picked before the shell hardens, brined and steeped in spiced vinegar until black. Sold in jars in Britain, harder to find elsewhere. They are intensely sour-sweet and malty; two chopped fine will not read as walnut in the finished sauce, only as depth.
- The butter and flourRubbed together cold in the pan, not cooked into a roux. It thickens as the liquid comes up to temperature. Half an ounce of flour to an ounce of butter gives a sauce that barely coats — do not expect gravy.
- YieldWith no steak weight in this fragment, any yield is inference: on a 1.5 to 2 lb piece it would serve three or four as a Victorian entrée — the small course between fish and roast — or two or three as a main course with potatoes.
This belongs to the era when a British kitchen's flavour came out of bottles: mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup and Worcestershire sauce were the standard trio of savoury correctives, all of them descended, directly or by imitation, from the fermented fish and mushroom liquors of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kitchens. Oysters appear here as a seasoning rather than a luxury: before the beds of the Thames estuary and the Channel were depleted in the later nineteenth century, oysters were cheap enough to be thrown into steak pies and beef stews by the dozen. The recipe following it, Filets de Bœuf à la Pompadour, carries the sort of French court name that English cookery books of the period attached freely to garnished fillets — the association with Madame de Pompadour is decorative rather than documented.