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Salt and Pepper
Carrots. Turnips. Onions. Larding Bacon.
Take a nice tender fillet of beef, trim it and lard it, put it in a stewpan on a bed of carrots, H turnips and onions cut up small; pour half a pint of stock over it, put the lid on, and let it cook for about twenty minutes. Butter some kitchen paper, and cover the steak over with it, add two quarts of stock, a little pepper and salt, and put the stewpan in the oven for about an hour and a half, basting it occasionally over the paper. Take out the fillet and strain, and reduce the stock to pour over the beef when dished up. Cook the mushrooms in the butter, cut the heads of celery into lengths of four inches, braise them in the white stock till quite tender.
Put the fillet of beef at one end of the dish, and pour the reduced stock over it; and, at the other end of the dish, put the celery and mushrooms. Serve very hot.
Filets de Bœuf à la Russe.
Ingredients.
One pound Fillet of Beef.
One gill of Glaze.
A late-Victorian braised and larded fillet, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the ingredient list is truncated and several items used in the method (mushrooms, celery, butter, stock) never appear in it. Read the method first and shop from that.
- The gill of glazeA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or a scant two-thirds of a US cup. "Glaze" here is glace de viande, brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Note, though, that "One pound Fillet of Beef. One gill of Glaze" appears under the heading Filets de Boeuf a la Russe and belongs to the following recipe; the braise described in the method calls for no glaze at all.
- Kitchen paper is not paper towelIn this period "kitchen paper" means a sheet of plain unbleached paper laid buttered-side down over the meat, the ancestor of a parchment cartouche. Use buttered baking parchment; paper towel will disintegrate and shed lint into the stock.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, because the book assumes a coal range. A braise of this kind is generally taken at a moderate oven, somewhere in the region of 300-325F, low enough that the liquid barely trembles. Anything hotter and it boils, which shreds the outside of the fillet before the centre is done.
- Larding baconLarding lardons are strips of firm back fat threaded through the meat with a larding needle. Butchers rarely sell them now and true back fat is scarce; salt pork or fatty unsmoked bacon cut into long batons is the usual substitute. The point is insurance: fillet has almost no internal fat and will dry out in a long wet cook.
- The timing is the weak pointAn hour and a half in the oven after twenty minutes on the stove will take the fillet well past pink. No weight is given for the meat in this recipe (the 'one pound' belongs to the recipe that follows), so judge by the size of the piece: modern cooks who want the beef pink should treat the braise as a sauce-building exercise and pull the meat at the doneness they actually want.
- Two quarts of stockThat is a great deal of liquid, and it is there to be reduced. Expect to boil the strained braising liquor down hard, by three-quarters or more, before it will coat the meat. The recipe does add a little pepper and salt before the oven, so be sparing at that point and correct the seasoning only after reducing, or the sauce will be too salty.
- Missing garnish quantitiesFor the vegetables the method needs but the list omits: reckon on 8 oz of button mushrooms sweated in butter and four to six heads of celery hearts, trimmed to four-inch lengths and braised separately in white stock so they stay pale against the dark sauce.
- YieldNo weight is given for the fillet in this recipe, so the number served depends on the size of the piece trimmed. The dish is composed on one platter, meat at one end, celery and mushrooms at the other, and it must go to table hot; the reduced stock dulls quickly as it cools.
Dishes labelled "à la russe" belong to a long line of Franco-Russian names that filled English menus in the same era in which service à la russe, the practice of bringing courses to table in sequence rather than laying everything out at once, became fashionable in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. The "à la russe" label attached itself loosely to a great many preparations in that era and rarely indicates any real Russian origin; here it functions mainly as a menu name, in French, because French was the language of the professional kitchen and of any household that wished to seem well appointed. What is genuinely of the period is the technique: larding a lean cut with strips of fat, braising it on a bed of aromatic vegetables under buttered paper, then straining and reducing the cooking liquor into a glaze-fortified sauce. That reduction was the mark of a serious kitchen, since it depended on having gallons of good stock and a stockpot always going, which is precisely why the recipe can call for two quarts of it without comment.