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Salt and Pepper (Broil the fillet nicely place)
Broil the fillet nicely, place a pat of Maître d'Hôtel butter on the top, and garnish round with the anchovies, olives, and watercress.
For the Maître d'Hôtel butter, take Three ounces of Butter.
One dessertspoonful of chopped Parsley.
One teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
A late-Victorian entrée in shorthand: a grilled fillet, a compound butter, and a salad garnish. The recipe assumes you already know how to season and cook the meat, so the useful work is in filling those gaps.
- "Broil" means grillIn British books of this period broiling is cooking over or under direct radiant heat — a gridiron over coals, or the modern overhead grill/broiler set high. It is not oven roasting.
- Which filletAlmost certainly beef fillet, cut into steaks (filet mignon or tournedos); the compound butter and garnish point that way, though the excerpt itself does not say. Around 1 to 1.5 inches thick works. Sear hard, then finish to 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare, resting five minutes before the butter goes on.
- The title is the missing instructionThe title is probably a stray ingredient line -- 'Salt and Pepper' most likely belongs to an ingredient list rather than being a heading, but either way it supplies the seasoning the instructions omit: season the meat on both sides before it touches the heat, and season the butter lightly as well.
- Maître d'hôtel butterThree ounces is about 6 tablespoons of butter, a dessertspoonful of parsley roughly 2 teaspoons, and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Use unsalted butter softened but not melted, work everything in with a fork, then roll in paper and chill firm so a coin-shaped pat can be cut.
- Melting is the pointThe pat must go on the steak at the moment of serving, straight from the fridge onto hot meat, so it slumps into a sauce at the table. Butter added early simply pools and separates on the plate.
- Anchovies and olivesAnchovies of the period were often salt-packed and needed soaking and filleting, though bottled ones were also sold; oil-packed fillets today are already mild, so use them as they are and lay them in a lattice or curl them around stoned green olives.
- WatercressA common garnish for grilled meats in this period, and generally eaten rather than left on the plate. Wash it, dry it thoroughly, and dress it with nothing more than a squeeze of lemon so it does not wilt against the hot plate.
- YieldThe butter quantity suits four to six steaks. Any surplus keeps a week refrigerated, or freezes as a log for later.
Maître d'hôtel butter — the butter of the master or steward of the house — is often said to belong to the dining-room rather than the kitchen: a compound butter simple enough, by the traditional explanation, to be finished at the service table or the carving sideboard, which is why parsley, lemon and nothing else are said to appear in it. By the time high-class cookery manuals were being written for English households in the later nineteenth century, the mixture was already so standard that authors gave the three ingredients and no method, exactly as here. The accompanying garnish of anchovy, olive and watercress marks the dish as an entrée in the formal Franco-British service of the period, where a small dressed fillet came between the fish and the roast, and where a plate was expected to carry a salty note, a sharp note and something green.