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Beefsteak with Anchovy Butter
For a medium-sized steak take one large anchovy, well washed and dried and pounded on a board. Mix the anchovy with a little butter, pass through a hair sieve, place the mixture on a warm dish, lay the steak on it, and serve.
A two-line garnish recipe of the kind Oscar's kitchen assumed a cook could already fill in: the steak's cooking is left entirely to you, and only the butter is specified. The whole point is that the anchovy butter melts under the hot meat and combines with the escaping juices, so the serving dish must be genuinely hot.
- The hinge: a hot dishThe hinge: a warm dish -- A cold platter turns the mixture into a greasy smear. Warm the serving plate well, or set it over the steam of a pan, so the butter melts into a sauce as the steak rests on it.
- What "one large anchovy" meansThe washing and drying suggest a whole salt-cured anchovy of the kind sold from a barrel or tin, rather than a modern oil-packed fillet. The nearest modern equivalent is two or three oil-packed fillets, blotted, or one whole salted anchovy rinsed and filleted off the backbone.
- How much butter"A little butter" is unhelpfully vague. Two tablespoons of unsalted butter to two or three anchovy fillets is a workable ratio for one steak; more butter makes it milder, less makes it aggressively salty.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, used to push the paste through and catch fibres and bone fragments. A fine-mesh stainless sieve does the same job; mashing everything smooth with a fork is a rougher substitute for the step, not what the recipe asks for.
- Salt the steak lightlyAnchovy brings substantial salt of its own. Season the meat less than you normally would, and taste the butter before deciding.
- The steak itselfThe cooking method is not given; a broiled or pan-grilled steak, served immediately, fits the instruction. Cook to your preferred doneness, then lay it straight on the butter rather than resting it elsewhere first, so the juices go into the sauce.
- YieldAs written, one medium steak, serving one or two. The butter scales up easily and can be rolled in parchment and chilled, then sliced onto the hot plate.
Anchovy butter belongs to a long English and Anglo-French habit of pairing beef with a salty fish accent, the same instinct behind anchovy essence in gravies and the anchovies in Worcestershire sauce. Escoffier and his contemporaries codified dozens of these compound butters, and a New York hotel kitchen of the 1890s would very likely have kept some of them on hand, though the details of that routine are a matter of inference rather than record. Oscar Tschirky's book is written for exactly that world: he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and many of his entries read as service notes to cooks who already knew how to broil a steak and needed only to be told what went under it.