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Pepper and Salt (Work all the ingredients into)
Work all the ingredients into a pat, and set the mixture in a cool place until wanted.
Filets de Bœuf Piqué à la Flamande. Trim and lard carefully about three pounds of fillet of beef. Braise until cooked about forty-five minutes. Then cut the fillet in slices and arrange down the centre of the dish. Serve brown sauce round. Garnish with heads of braised lettuce, carrots, and turnips turned into fancy shapes, rings of fried onions and little bits of streaky bacon.
The carrots and turnips must be boiled separately Filets de Bœuf aux Huîtres.
Ingredients.
One pound of Fillet Steak.
The page runs two recipes together and cuts off mid-list, but the Flemish-style larded fillet is complete enough to cook from. It assumes a kitchen with a larding needle, a stockpot of brown sauce always going, and someone to turn vegetables into barrel shapes.
- The hinge: braise, then rest before slicingThe recipe says nothing about resting, but letting a 3 lb fillet stand 10-15 minutes before cutting stops the slices bleeding over the dish. Forty-five minutes is unlikely to take a fillet of this size much past pink, though fillet tapers badly and the thin end overcooks first; check with a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Larding"Piqué" means threaded through with strips of firm back fat using a larding needle. Modern fillet is leaner than Victorian beef and genuinely benefits, but if you have no needle, barding — tying sheets of fat or streaky bacon over the top — gives most of the effect.
- Braising is not stewing herePeriod braising means a tight-lidded pan with a shallow bed of aromatics and a little stock, not the joint submerged. Brown the fillet hard first; a pale braised fillet in brown sauce looks grey.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this class this is espagnole — brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix, tomato, reduced and skimmed over hours. A modern cook can reduce good beef stock with a little wine and mount it with butter and get an honest equivalent.
- Turned vegetables"turned into fancy shapes" means cut to uniform small forms: barrels, olives or balls, the seven-sided barrel being the best-known of them. The instruction to boil carrots and turnips separately is not fussiness: they cook at different rates and the flavours carry across in shared water.
- Braised lettuceWhole hearts of cos or little gem, blanched, squeezed dry, then braised in stock with butter and pressed flat. They should be soft and glossy, not crisp.
- YieldThree pounds of fillet, the recipe's figure being before trimming, serves around six as a main course with the garnish.
- The stray opening line"Work all the ingredients into a pat" belongs to a preceding compound-butter or seasoning recipe whose ingredient list is not on this page. Ignore it; it has nothing to do with the beef.
Fillet of beef larded, braised and set out with turned root vegetables, glazed onions and braised lettuce hearts is a set piece of the Franco-British grande cuisine that dominated late nineteenth-century English cookery schools, where a "high-class" repertoire meant a French one written in English. The tag à la flamande — in the Flemish manner — is used loosely in period cookery; it generally signals a garnish of braised vegetables, and in some kitchens implies beer or a beer-touched braising liquid, though nothing here says so. What the recipe really documents is a division of labour that no longer exists: the vegetables boiled in separate pans, the onions fried, the lettuce braised, the espagnole drawn from a sauce already standing on the stove, all of it converging on one dish because a brigade of hands was assumed. The instruction to keep the compound butter of the preceding recipe "in a cool place until wanted" belongs to the same world — a larder rather than a refrigerator, and a cook who prepared components hours ahead of service.