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Salt, Pepper, Cayenne and Nutmeg
Remove the sinews from the meat, cut it into small pieces and chop it up very fine, or pass it twice through the mincing machine. Mix this with chopped parsley, savoury herbs, a little flour, one yolk of egg and one whole egg, season with salt, pepper, and a little grated nutmeg. Form some even-sized balls, flatten each with the palm of your hand to give them the shape of round fillets.
Peel and slice the onions, cut some of the slices from the centre of each onion rather thicker than the rest, divide the rings carefully, and reserve the largest for frying separately. Dissolve about an ounce of butter in a frying-pan, and fry the onions until of a golden colour. Put them in a small stewpan with sufficient brown sauce to keep moist, and allow to simmer gently for about twenty minutes, F Dredge the prepared fillets with a little flour, and fry in butter in a frying-pan. Dip the onion rings into flour, then into white of egg, and again into flour, place them in a frying-basket and fry a golden colour.
Dish up the fillets, put a spoonful of stewed onions on the centre of each. Ornament round the fillets with the fried onion rings. Sauce over the fillets with demi-glace sauce, sprinkle with a few drops of meat glaze, and serve.
This is a Hamburg-style minced steak with a double onion treatment — some stewed soft in brown sauce, some deep-fried as rings. The instructions assume a stocked professional kitchen, so the quantities have to be judged by eye.
- Quantities to work fromNo weights are given, and the recipe never names the meat. Assuming beef, about 1 1/2 lb, one yolk plus one whole egg, a tablespoon of flour and two or three large onions would make roughly four fillets, enough for four as a main course.
- The cut"Remove the sinews from the meat" implies a cut trimmed by hand rather than ready-minced meat; the recipe does not say which. Chuck or rump, ground once coarse then once fine, gives the right texture, and ready mince passed through a machine a second time works too.
- Mince, do not pasteTwo passes through a mincer is the limit. A food processor turns the mixture to an emulsified paste and the fillets bounce rather than crumble.
- Brown sauce and demi-glaceBoth are classic reductions of brown stock. A modern kitchen can reduce good beef stock with a little tomato and a butter-flour roux; the stewed onions want only enough to keep them moist, not to swim.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A few drops of a strongly reduced stock, or a small amount of commercial demi-glace concentrate, does the same job.
- Frying the filletsButter alone browns fast at the heat needed here. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and cook 3-4 minutes a side for fillets about 3/4 inch thick.
- The onion ringsFlour, egg white, flour is a light coating with no liquid batter, so it goes on thin and crisps quickly. Fry at 350-375F for two or three minutes and drain well; they soften within minutes of being set on the sauce, so fry them last.
- Stewed onionsTwenty minutes of gentle simmering after the golden fry is right — the onions should be jammy and sweet, not merely soft.
Minced beef shaped into round "fillets" and served with onions appeared in British hotel and restaurant cookery from the later nineteenth century, on menus as bifteck a la Hambourgeoise or steak a la Hambourg, and is commonly described as an ancestor of the hamburger — still knife-and-fork food eaten with sauce rather than bread. The recipe divides the onions by size, not by thrift: the largest rings, taken from the thicker centre slices, are reserved for the fryer, while the remaining slices are the ones fried in butter and stewed. The reliance on brown sauce, demi-glace and a final flick of meat glaze points to a kitchen organised around a brown stock and its derivative sauces.