No. 1374
Small Sirloin Steak, with Butter and Cooked Fine Herbs
Bifteck de Contrefilet au Beurre aux et Fine Herbes Cuites
This is a finishing note rather than a full method: Ranhofer assumes you have already grilled the steak by his plain recipe and made his cooked fine herbs separately. What follows is what those cross-references amount to and how to handle the parts he leaves unsaid.
- What cut this isContrefilet is the strip loin — the boneless top half of the sirloin, sold today as New York strip, Kansas City strip or (in Britain) sirloin steak. It is called "small" in contrast to the twenty-ounce Delmonico steak that follows it; this entry gives no weight.
- "Cooked as explained in plain"The reference is to Ranhofer's plain broiled steak at No. 1368, cooked over a clear fire; the seasoning and handling are set out there rather than here. On a modern grill or heavy pan at high heat throughout, about 3 to 4 minutes a side for an inch-thick steak will bring it to medium rare, 130-135F at the centre.
- Cooked fine herbsRanhofer's fines herbes cuites (No. 385) are aromatics softened in butter rather than stirred in raw — finely chopped shallot and parsley, commonly with mushroom. Here they go over the hot steak together with butter and are left to melt into the juices; it is not a sauce to be poured. For the exact composition, see No. 385.
- Rest before you dress itThe butter should meet a steak that has sat five minutes off the heat. Applied straight from the fire it slides off with the first run of juice and pools on the platter instead of glazing the meat.
- The watercressSalt and vinegar only — no oil. The point of the garnish is a sharp, peppery counter to the butter, and the cress should be dressed at the last moment or it collapses. Plain cider or wine vinegar is right; a heavy balsamic is not.
- YieldOne steak, one person. To serve four, cook four steaks rather than one large one carved at table. The recipe gives no quantities for either the butter or the cress.
The number belongs to Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Its beef section runs through the sirloin in exhaustive variation — plain, ancient style, with butter and fine herbs, and the twenty-ounce Delmonico steak — because that was how a restaurant carte worked: one cut, one fire, and a shelf of finishing butters and garnishes to distinguish the orders. The cross-referencing that makes the entry read like a fragment reflects the fact that Ranhofer wrote for a brigade that already knew the plain broil and kept the fine herbs made up in advance. Contrefilet is the French butcher's term for the strip loin lying opposite the fillet along the backbone, and the watercress with salt and vinegar is often said to have been the usual accompaniment to grilled meat in nineteenth-century French service, a habit that survives on steak plates today largely as decoration.