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Beefsteaks, Rolled
Cut from a two-pound piece rump steak six equal slices, flatten them to quarter-inch thickness. Season all around with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then roll up.
Finely chop one bean garlic, three shallots and four branches parsley, place these on a plate and lightly roll steaks in the mixture. Then envelop each steak in a thin slice of larding pork. Tie around with string. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a sautoire, place steaks in the pan, one beside another, and fry ten minutes, frequently turning, then set in oven fifteen minutes. Remove, untie, dress on a hot dish. Remove all fat from pan, add a teaspoon flour; stir well, then pour in two tablespoons sherry, three tablespoons tomato catsup, a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce and half gill broth. Mix well, boil three minutes. Pour the sauce over the steaks and serve.
A straightforward beef roulade with a quick pan sauce. The original assumes a professional kitchen where oven temperature and pan type went without saying.
- SautoireA straight-sided, shallow frying pan with a lid — a modern 10- to 12-inch skillet or saute pan does the job. It must be ovenproof, since the rolls go straight from stovetop to oven in the same pan.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book offers no guidance. A moderate to fairly hot oven, somewhere in the region of 350-400F, would finish the rolls in the fifteen minutes stated after the sear, but this is inference rather than anything Filippini specifies.
- "One bean garlic"One clove, not a head. The odd wording is usually taken to reflect French kitchen usage (gousse d'ail, a pod or clove), though the derivation is not certain.
- Larding porkFresh pork fatback or unsmoked salt pork, sliced thin. Thin-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the practical substitute; smoked bacon will dominate the garlic and parsley.
- Half gill brothA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup). Beef broth is intended.
- Cut and thicknessTwo pounds of rump divided into six slices gives portions of about five ounces each, pounded to a quarter inch. Cut with the grain running across the roll so each slice of the finished roulade is cut against it.
- The hinge: dry the surfacesThe hinge: get the pan hot -- The chopped garlic, shallot and parsley go onto the meat before it is wrapped in larding pork, so it is the pork bard that meets the pan. Let the lard get properly hot before the rolls go in.
- SauceA teaspoon of flour into the pan drippings is a very light thickening — expect a thin, glossy sauce rather than a gravy. Three minutes' boiling is enough to cook out the raw flour and take the edge off the sherry.
- YieldSix rolls, serving three to six depending on what else is on the table.
This is French bourgeois cooking in American dress: paupiettes de boeuf, thin slices of beef spread with seasoning, rolled, barded with pork fat and braised or roasted — a technique documented in French kitchens long before it reached hotel dining rooms in the United States. Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, wrote for cooks who worked in that idiom, and the traces show throughout: the sautoire, the "bean" of garlic often read as a direct translation of gousse, the assumption that the reader knows what a moderate oven feels like. What marks the dish as American rather than Parisian is the finish — sherry and broth are classical enough, but three tablespoons of tomato catsup and a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce belong to the bottled-condiment shelf of the turn-of-the-century American pantry, where both were staples by the 1900s.