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Fillets of Beef
385. Cut the inside of a sirloin of beef into slices half an inch in thickness, trim them, and season with pepper and salt, and fry them, and serve with tomata or sorrel sauce.
TRIPE. 386. Tripe should always be bought ready prepared by the tripeseller, in which state it merely requires boiling for an hour.
A plainly written pan-fried steak from the Victorian larder, with a one-line note on tripe appended below it. Both assume a butcher who has done most of the work already.
- "The inside of a sirloin"This is the fillet, or tenderloin, the muscle lying under the sirloin bone on a whole traditional joint. Buy a piece of beef tenderloin and cut it across into half-inch slices, which will give you medallions rather than thick steaks.
- Half an inch is deliberateHalf an inch is a thin cut. At that thickness the meat cooks through very quickly over high heat, a few minutes a side, and the trimming and thin slicing suit a frying pan — though the book itself gives no timing.
- "Trim them"Remove the silverskin, the pearly membrane along one side of the tenderloin. It does not render and will make the medallions curl and toughen in the pan.
- Frying fatThe book takes it for granted that you are frying in butter, dripping or a mixture. Butter alone will burn at the heat needed here, so use clarified butter, dripping, or butter cut with a neutral oil.
- "Tomata sauce"Simply the period spelling of tomato. In British books of this date it means a cooked, sieved sauce of tomatoes with onion and stock, reduced and often thickened, not a raw or fresh salsa.
- Sorrel sauceSorrel is a sharp, lemony leaf that collapses almost instantly in butter into a puree. It bruises and discolours quickly, so make the sauce shortly before serving; spinach with lemon is the usual stand-in when sorrel cannot be found.
- The tripe note"ready prepared" meant tripe already scalded, cleaned and largely cooked by the tripe dresser, so an hour was only a finishing simmer. Tripe sold today is cleaned and often bleached, but usually far less cooked, and may need two or three hours' gentle simmering before it is tender.
The fillet was the prized cut of the sirloin, and its treatment here is plain: a hot pan, salt, pepper and nothing else, with the interest pushed onto the sauce. Tomato sauce and sorrel sauce sit at two ends of the same idea, both bringing acidity to cut rich fried beef, with sorrel the older and more French of the pair and tomato the later arrival in British kitchens. The appended line on tripe is a reminder of a trade that has largely vanished: the tripe dresser was a specialist trade in northern and midland towns, doing the long, malodorous work of scraping, scalding and boiling so that the household cook could treat tripe as a near-ready convenience food.