Pepper and Salt (One gill of Espagnole Sauce)

This page is a fragment of a larger sequence: the opening lines are the tail end of the preceding fillet recipe, and the Filets de Bœuf à la Mirabeau that follows gives only its ingredient list. Both assume a kitchen with sauces already standing in the larder.

• A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is 5 fl oz, or a scant 150 ml — not the American quarter-pint. That is a small saucepan's worth of Espagnole, enough to pour round a single dish of fillets.
• Espagnole and glazeEspagnole is the brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Glaze (glace de viande) is stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Both are more often bought than made today; a good reduced veal or beef demi-glace stands in for the first, and a spoonful of it reduced further for the second.
• "Fillets"These are cut from the beef tenderloin — medallions or tournedos, roughly 1 to 1½ inches thick. One pound yields three or four small ones, so two servings as an entrée in the modern sense.
• Cooking timeThe original says only "when cooked," which for late-Victorian service meant briefly. Sear in foaming butter, 2 to 3 minutes a side for medium-rare, and rest them while you finish the sauce. Fillet has almost no fat and turns dry and grey if held on the heat.
• The mushroomThe definite article refers back to an ingredient listed in the part of the recipe that is missing from this page, so neither the quantity nor the kind can be recovered here. Cook whatever mushroom you use in the same butter as the fillets.
• Turned olives"Turned" olives are pared with a small knife in a spiral round the stone, so that the flesh comes away in one neat piece. Stoned green olives, trimmed neat, serve the purpose.
• Maître d'hôtel butterThe parsley, lemon juice and three ounces of butter in the Mirabeau list are the compound butter itself: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, rolled in paper and chilled, then sliced onto the hot meat.
• Assembling à la MirabeauAssembling a la Mirabeau -- No method is printed with the ingredient list. Versions of the garnish generally set the anchovy fillets in a lattice or cross over each medallion, with the olives between them, a slice of butter on top and watercress at the side; note that this list specifies maitre d'hotel butter rather than the anchovy butter found elsewhere. Salt the beef lightly -- the anchovies and olives bring plenty.
• BéarnaiseA warm emulsion of egg yolk and butter flavoured with a tarragon-and-shallot vinegar reduction. It splits if it gets hot, so make it last and hold it barely warm; serving it in the centre of the ring of fillets, as directed, keeps it off the direct heat of the plate.