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Chachelique, Caucases
Cut two pounds raw beef from rump in quarter-inch slices, place in an earthen jar, add a sliced white onion, half gill vinegar, two tablespoons sherry, half gill white wine, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon freshly crushed black pepper, mix well, then let marinade for two hours. Take up beef, place on a broiler and broil over a brisk charcoal fire for four minutes on each side, remove and dress on hot dish and keep hot. Place marinade in a saucepan and let reduce on open fire to one-third the quantity, then pour in a half gill each demi-glace and tomato sauce, mix with wooden spoon and let boil for eight minutes. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over beef, arrange a thin slice of lemon on top of each and serve.
A marinated grilled beef with a reduction sauce, written for a hotel kitchen with a charcoal broiler and a stockpot of demi-glace at hand. Two details matter most: the slices are thin, and the marinade becomes the sauce.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons). The marinade therefore totals about 1/2 cup of vinegar and wine for 2 lb of beef, plus 2 tablespoons sherry.
- Cut and cooking timeQuarter-inch slices of rump over a hot charcoal fire are done in about 1 to 2 minutes a side. Four minutes each side, as written, will take thin beef well past grey.
- Marinating windowTwo hours in vinegar and wine reads as a set time rather than a minimum. Left overnight the acid can turn the surface of the beef pale and mealy, and the finished sauce harsher.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown stock, classically espagnole (brown stock thickened with a little roux) reduced further with more stock. Good tubs or concentrates are sold now; the recipe needs only half a gill (1/4 cup), so a small amount of well-reduced homemade brown stock does the same job. Skip it and the sauce is only sharp marinade.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the fine conical strainer. Any fine-mesh sieve works; the point is to remove the onion and cracked pepper so the sauce coats cleanly.
- Reduce, then finishBoil the strained marinade down to about a third (roughly 3 tablespoons) before the demi-glace and tomato sauce go in. Adding them too early leaves the sauce tasting of raw vinegar.
- Tomato sauceIn a 1900s professional kitchen this means a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce from the daily mise en place, not ketchup or plain puree. A simple tomato sauce simmered with a little onion and stock is closer than a jarred pasta sauce.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef serves four generously as a main course. Sauce the meat at the last moment; thin slices cool quickly, so warm the platter well.
The spelling here is one of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French-kitchen attempts at shashlik (Russian shashlyk, from a Turkic word for skewer), the charcoal-grilled marinated meat of the Caucasus, said by tradition to have travelled north into Russian restaurant cooking during the 1800s. By the time it reached a book like this it had been thoroughly Frenchified: the skewer has become a broiler grid, and the marinade is finished with demi-glace and tomato sauce. The lemon slice on each portion is the same gesture found on grilled meats throughout Escoffier-era menus. Dishes like this were presented to American readers in the only technical vocabulary the professional kitchen then had, which is why a Caucasian dish arrives with a French sauce base and a chinois.