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The Cook's: Ingredients
No. 79. Manzo in Insalata (Marinated Beef) Ingredients: Beef, oil, salt, pepper, vinegar, parsley, capers, mushrooms, olives, vegetables.
Cook a fillet of beef (or the thin end of a sirloin), which has been previously marinated for two days in oil, salt, pepper, vinegar, and chopped parsley. When cold press and glaze it, garnish it with capers, mushrooms preserved in vinegar or gherkins, olives, and any kind of vegetables marinated like the beef. Serve cold. No. 80. Filetto di Bue con Pistacchi (Fillets of Beef with Pistacchios) Ingredients: Fillet of beef, oil, salt, flour, pistacchio nuts, gravy.
Cut a piece of tender beef into little fillets, and put them in a stewpan with a tablespoonful of olive oil and salt. After they have cooked for a few minutes, powder them with flour, and strew over each fillet some chopped pistacchio nuts. Add a few spoonsful of very good boiling gravy, and cook for another half-hour.
No. 81. Scalopini di Riso (Beef with Risotto) Ingredients: Rump steak, butter, rice, truffles, tongue, stock, mushrooms.
Slightly stew a bit of rump steak with bits of tongue and mushrooms; let it get cold, and cut it into scallops.
Butter a pie dish, and garnish the bottom of it with cooked tongue and slices of cooked truffle, then over this put a layer of well-cooked and seasoned risotto (No. 190), then a layer of the scallops of beef, and then another layer of risotto. Heat in a bainmarie, and turn out of the pie dish, and serve with a very good sauce poured round it.
Three cold- and warm-service beef dishes from an Italian repertoire written for cooks with a larder, a stockpot and an unhurried timetable. None is difficult, but all three assume things the modern kitchen no longer supplies by default.
- Marinate in the refrigeratorNo. 79 asks for two days in oil, vinegar and seasoning; do that covered in the refrigerator, not on a cool shelf. Turn the meat once or twice so the whole surface stays in contact with the acid.
- "Cook a fillet" means roast it"Cook a fillet" -- no method is given at all; roasting is the likely intention. Pat the marinated meat dry, sear it, then roast in a hot oven (around 400F) to 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare. A whole fillet takes roughly 25-35 minutes depending on thickness; overcooking makes a poor cold dish. The temperature and timing are modern additions, not the book's.
- Press and glazePressing means cooling the meat under a weighted plate so it slices cleanly. "Glaze" is aspic or a reduced meat glaze brushed over the cold surface for shine, not a sweet coating. Either can be skipped; the beef simply looks plainer.
- Gravy in No. 80 is stock, not flour sauce"Very good boiling gravy" here is concentrated brown veal or beef stock. Use a good reduced stock; a packet gravy granule mixture will taste wrong against the pistachios.
- Half an hour is too long for small filletsNo. 80's timing suits thick medallions that will finish braised through. If your fillets are thin, cook them briefly, remove them, reduce the stock with the flour and nuts to a sauce, and return the meat at the end.
- PistachiosUse unsalted, unroasted green pistachios and chop them coarsely. Salted roasted nuts will push the dish over, since salt has already gone into the pan.
- Bain-marie for No. 81Stand the assembled pie dish in a tin or pan of hot water reaching halfway up and heat gently, on the stovetop or in a moderate oven, until hot to a skewer in the centre; the book gives no temperature or time. The water bath is what keeps the risotto from drying and browning at the edges.
- Truffle and tongueBoth are optional luxuries in a dish built from cooked leftovers. Sauteed cremini or a little dried porcini stand in for the truffle; a good cooked ham can replace tongue if you cannot source it.
- YieldNo quantities are given; as written each of the three would plausibly serve four to six. No. 79 in particular suits a buffet or cold luncheon.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was assembled by Mrs. W. G. Waters as a collection of Italian recipes framed by a Boccaccio-style conceit of a house party discussing and cooking dishes over ten days. These three show the range of what "Italian cooking" meant to that readership: manzo in insalata is a genuinely domestic way of stretching and reviving a joint, dressing cold roast beef with the same marinade that seasoned it, while the risotto-layered scalopini di riso and the pistachio fillets belong to the ornamental, French-influenced service of the period, complete with glazing and a bain-marie. Pistachios with meat point to southern Italy and to a much older Arab-influenced habit, generally traced through Sicily, of using nuts as both thickener and garnish rather than as a sweet. The terse ingredient lists and absent temperatures are characteristic: the book was written when a professional or well-trained cook was assumed to be standing at the range.