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Beefsteak à la Mirabeau
Garnish a broiled porterhouse or cross-cut of rump steak with anchovies, and stoned olives stuffed with green butter and chopped parsley. Arrange around steak stuffed tomatoes, and fried potato balls served in shells made from noodle mixture. Pour around the following sauce: Melt two tablespoons butter, add two and one-half tablespoons browned flour, then add one cup Chicken Stock. Season with one tablespoon tomato catsup and salt and pepper.
Noodle Shells. Make noodle mixture (see p.147), roll as thinly as possible, cut in pieces, and shape over buttered inverted scallop shells. Put in dripping-pan and bake in a slow oven. As mixture bakes it curls from edges, when cases should be slipped from shells and pressed firmly in insides of shells to finish cooking and leave an impression of shells. Potato balls served in these shells make an attractive garnish for broiled fish and meats.
This is an assembly rather than a single dish: a broiled steak, four separate garnishes, and a brown sauce, all finished at once. Read it backwards and make the noodle shells first, since they are the only component that keeps.
- Slow ovenFor the noodle shells this means about 300F. They are meant to dry and set rather than color; at a higher heat the thin dough browns and cracks before it curls off the shell.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-colored, used in the period to give brown sauces depth without long simmering. Browned flour is generally held to thicken less than raw, which may account for the two and a half tablespoons called for against two of butter. Modern equivalent: cook a plain roux until it smells toasted and looks like peanut butter.
- Chicken StockThe book's own recipe, cross-referenced here; check it for salt before seasoning, since commercial broth is already salted. Two and a half tablespoons of flour to one cup of stock gives a thick, gravy-like sauce, though browned flour thickens less than raw.
- Tomato catsupPeriod catsup was generally thinner and sharper than the modern bottle, though sweetness varied by maker. Use a scant tablespoon, or substitute a teaspoon of tomato paste plus a few drops of vinegar, and taste before adding more.
- Anchovies and stoned olives"Stoned" means pitted. Period anchovies came salt-packed and needed rinsing and often filleting; oil-packed fillets are ready to use. Taste before salting the sauce.
- Green butterButter creamed with pounded parsley or spinach and a little lemon, sometimes with anchovy worked in — soft enough to pipe into the olives, and it must stay cold or it will slump on the warm platter.
- The noodle shellsThe hinge of the whole plate. Roll the dough thin enough to see light through, drape it over buttered inverted scallop shells, and watch it: as soon as the edges lift, slip the case off and press it inside a shell to finish. Left too long on the outside it sets in a curl and will not take the impression.
- The steak itselfA porterhouse or cross-cut of rump, broiled. Pull it at 130-135F internal for medium-rare and let it rest while you plate the garnishes; the sauce is poured around it, never over, so the crust stays dry.
- YieldNo serving count is given. A porterhouse cut thick enough to broil this way feeds two to three, and the garnish quantities scale with the number of shells you can be bothered to make.
The Mirabeau garnish — anchovy and pitted olives, usually with anchovy butter — appears in the French restaurant repertoire codified around the turn of the century, and is generally traced to the Comte de Mirabeau of the Revolutionary period, though as with most of these named garnishes the connection is traditional rather than documented. What is telling is its appearance in a Boston cooking-school manual aimed at American housekeepers: Fannie Farmer's book is remembered for level measurements and plain instruction, but it also carried a full apparatus of hotel-style presentation, because the mistress of a middle-class household was expected to know what a company dinner looked like when it came to table. The noodle shells belong to the same impulse — an edible container shaped over a real scallop shell, made from nothing more than egg pasta, offered here as a general-purpose garnish for fish and meats. It is decorative cooking done with the cheapest possible materials, which is a fair description of much American entertaining in the 1890s.