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Six Chestnuts
Trim the fillet of beef, tie it up carefully and put it into an earthen pan. Boil the claret, water, onion, carrot, bayleaf, and peppercorns together, and when the mixture is cold pour it over the beef and allow it to stand two days. Then braise the beef as usual for about forty-five minutes, and when cooked cut it into slices. Arrange these slices up the centre of the dish and pour brown sauce round. To garnish the entrée have the onions fried brown in butter, the sausage meat rolled in little pieces and cooked in the oven, and the chestnuts boiled tender in stock. Mix these together and serve in groups round the beef.
A marinated and braised fillet of beef with a garnish of onions, sausage meat and chestnuts. The title is a fragment of an ingredient column that sat beside the method in the original book, so the quantities have to be reconstructed.
- No quantities surviveNo quantities survive in the method -- books of this type printed ingredients in a side column that does not travel with the text. The stray title preserves one figure, six chestnuts. Work from a 2-3 lb trimmed fillet, a bottle of claret with about half its volume in water, one onion and one carrot sliced, a bayleaf and a dozen peppercorns for the marinade, and six chestnuts with 8 oz sausage meat for the garnish.
- ClaretIn British usage claret means red Bordeaux, and by extension any dry red of that style. Boiling it first, as directed, drives off some alcohol and softens the raw edge; it must be fully cold before it touches the meat.
- The earthen pan, and where it standsAn earthenware or glass bowl, not metal — two days in acidic wine will pit aluminium and pull metal into the sauce. Two days in a period cold larder means two days in the refrigerator now, covered, with the beef turned once a day.
- Braise, in the period senseBraise -- A tight-lidded pan with a little fat and a shallow depth of stock or strained marinade, not submerged like a stew. The book gives no setting; a modern oven equivalent is 325-350F. Baste and keep the lid on.
- Forty-five minutes is the hingeThat timing suits a whole fillet taken to rare or medium-rare, which is the only way this cut repays braising. Use a thermometer and pull it at 125-130F in the centre; held longer, fillet turns grey and dry and no sauce will rescue it. Rest it 10 minutes before slicing.
- Brown sauceEspagnole — a brown roux let down with brown stock and reduced. A good reduced beef stock thickened lightly with a beurre manié gives the same body without the two-day sauce base.
- ChestnutsFresh chestnuts must be scored and roasted or blanched to get both skins off before they are simmered in stock. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts are the practical substitute; they need only to be warmed through in stock, as they collapse if boiled hard.
- The garnishRoll the sausage meat into balls the size of a walnut and bake at 375F for about 20 minutes; fry small whole or quartered onions in butter until well browned. Everything should be hot at the moment of serving, since the groups sit uncovered around the meat.
- YieldA 2-3 lb fillet served in slices with this weight of garnish will feed six to eight as a main course, rather more if it is genuinely used as one entrée in a longer meal.
Marinating beef for days in red wine with onion, carrot, bay and peppercorns is the old French marinade cuite, a technique often associated with boeuf à la mode and the whole family of braised beef dishes; it is traditionally said to have begun as a way of handling meat that needed help, and it survived into luxury cookery long after the meat stopped needing it. What is distinctive here is applying it to fillet, the most expensive and least braise-worthy cut, and then cutting the braising time to three-quarters of an hour — a compromise typical of high-class cookery instruction around the turn of the twentieth century, where French method met British preference for a good red cut of beef. The garnish places the dish in autumn: chestnuts, browned onions and sausage meat are the standard trimmings of the game and cold-weather table, and the whole thing belongs to the entrée course, served between fish and roast, which is why the portions are sliced and arranged rather than carved at table.