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Porterhouse Steak with Mushroom Sauce
Serve broiled Porterhouse Steak with Mushroom Sauce. Porterhouse Steak with Tomato and Mushroom Sauce Serve broiled Porterhouse Steak with Tomato and Mushroom Sauce. Porterhouse Steak, Bordelaise Sauce Serve broiled porterhouse steak with Bordelaise Sauce. Cook one shallot, finely chopped, with one-fourth cup claret until claret is reduced to two tablespoons, and strain. Melt two tablespoons butter, add one slice onion, two slices carrot, sprig of parsley, bit of bay leaf, eight peppercorns, and one clove, and cook until brown. Add three and one-half tablespoons flour, and when well browned add gradually one cup Brown Stock. Strain, let simmer eight minutes, add claret and one tablespoon butter. Season with salt and pepper. Remove marrow from a marrow-bone and cut in one-third inch slices; then poach in boiling water. Arrange on and around steak, and pour around sauce. 1/2 cup butter Yolks 3 eggs
The first two lines are cross-references; the substance here is the Bordelaise, a brown sauce finished with red wine and served with poached beef marrow. A few of Farmer's assumptions need translating.
- The stray last line"1/2 cup butter / Yolks 3 eggs" belongs to the next recipe in the book, almost certainly a Bearnaise or Hollandaise ingredient list. It is not part of the Bordelaise and should be ignored.
- ClaretIn 1896 this simply meant dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; a quarter cup reduced to two tablespoons is the point, not the label.
- Brown StockFarmer's Brown Stock is a long-simmered beef stock made from shin of beef and bone, with part of the meat browned in fat first. Use a good unsalted beef stock, and season at the end only, since reducing a salted commercial stock will make the sauce harsh.
- The roux is the hingeThree and a half tablespoons of flour to two tablespoons butter is a dry, tight roux, and it must brown properly before the stock goes in. Underbrown it and the sauce tastes of raw flour; add the stock too fast and it lumps. Add it in stages, whisking.
- MarrowAsk for center-cut marrow bones and push the marrow out after an hour of soaking or a few minutes in warm water. Poach the slices in barely simmering, lightly salted water for one to two minutes only, until just translucent; a hard boil melts them into the pot.
- Porterhouse todayA modern porterhouse is typically 1.5 to 2 inches thick and 24 to 32 oz, serving two to three. Broil it under high heat, and rest it 8 to 10 minutes before slicing.
- YieldThe sauce as written makes roughly three-quarters of a cup after reduction and straining, enough for one large steak.
Sauce bordelaise takes its name from Bordeaux and from the red wine of that region, and in classic French practice it is a reduction of wine, shallot and pepper bound with a brown sauce and garnished with poached beef marrow, which is what makes the sauce recognizably bordelaise rather than simply a red-wine gravy. Fannie Farmer's version follows the general French pattern, building a brown sauce from scratch with a browned mirepoix and a dark roux, though it is a quick household sauce rather than the long-simmered espagnole or demi-glace base of the professional French kitchen; its presence in a Boston cooking-school book shows how far the French repertoire had entered American middle-class instruction by the 1890s. The list of steak-and-sauce pairings around it, mushroom, tomato and mushroom, bordelaise, reflects the period habit of teaching a handful of base sauces and then cataloguing the dishes they could be dressed with, so a cook learned combinations rather than isolated recipes.