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Bitokes, Tiflis
Mince well together two pounds raw beef and a half pound beefkidney suet, season with a light teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, adding a tablespoon butter, mix until well amalgamated, then divide in twelve equal parts. Roll out on a lightly floured table to round, cake-like forms, heat two tablespoons leaf lard in a sauteuse, arrange in the bitokes, one beside another, and gently fry for five minutes on each side. Lift up and dress on a hot dish in crown-like shape. Prepare a potato saute and place in centre of bitokes. Boil one and a half gills cream with two tablespoons fresh, grated horseradish for five minutes, then press through a cheesecloth over the bitokes and serve.
A Russian-style minced beef cake with a horseradish cream poured over at the last moment. The proportions are sound; the vocabulary and the frying time are what need translating.
- The hinge: sauce at the end, off the heatBoil the cream with the horseradish, strain it, and pour it over the patties just as they go to the table. Horseradish loses its heat rapidly once cooked, and cream held over a flame after the meat is plated will break or skin over.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon pepper. A gill is half a cup, making one and a half gills roughly 6 fl oz, or 3/4 cup of cream.
- Suet and leaf lardA half pound of beef kidney suet to two pounds of beef gives roughly a fifth of the mixture in added fat, before whatever fat is in the meat itself. Ground beef at 80/20 is the nearest supermarket approximation; if you want the original texture, ask a butcher for suet and grind or chop it in with the meat. Leaf lard can be replaced with any lard, clarified butter or neutral oil.
- SauteuseA wide, shallow saute pan; strictly the sloping-sided form, the straight-sided one being a sautoir. Two tablespoons of fat in a 12-inch pan is enough; work in two batches rather than crowding, since steam prevents browning.
- Frying timeFive minutes a side over medium heat suits patties around 3/4 inch thick and should be enough to take ground beef past a safe 160F, though this varies with pan and heat. Thinner cakes will be dry well before ten minutes total; go by an instant-read thermometer, not the clock.
- "Roll out on a lightly floured table"This means patting each portion into a flat round with the hands or a light pass of the pin, not rolling to a sheet. The dusting of flour helps the surface brown and keeps the mixture from sticking.
- Potato sauteDiced or sliced boiled potatoes fried in butter or lard until crisp at the edges. Cook them first and hold them warm, since the meat wants the hot pan last.
- Straining the saucePressing through cheesecloth removes the horseradish shreds and leaves a thin, sharp cream. Skip the straining if you would rather keep the texture, but expect a coarser sauce than the book intends.
- YieldTwelve cakes, serving six as a main course with the potatoes.
Bitokes is the French spelling of the Russian bitki or bitochki, small beaten cutlets of minced meat, from the verb meaning to beat; the dish travelled into French professional cooking in the nineteenth century and turns up in restaurant repertoires as bitokes a la russe, usually with a cream or sour cream sauce. Tiflis is the old name for Tbilisi, then a major city of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Georgia, and cookbooks of this period attached such city names to variants more or less loosely -- here the marker is the horseradish cream rather than the smetana or mushroom sauces used elsewhere. The beef kidney suet worked into lean meat is the older way of keeping a minced cutlet juicy, before high-fat commercial ground beef made the step unnecessary.