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Cotes of Beef with New Carrots
Procure two single ribs tender beef. Neatly trim all around, season with good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. With a larding needle insert a few strips of larding pork on surface of each rib. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a braising pan, place the cotes in the pan, one beside another, and gently brown on range ten minutes on each side. Add twelve sliced new carrots and brown five minutes more. Moisten with one gill claret. Cover pan and let reduce ten minutes. Pour in one gill demi-glace and one gill tomato sauce. Finely chop four sound shallots, two branches parsley, half a bean garlic, a few branches chives, and add to pan. Set in oven twelve minutes. Remove ribs, dress on a hot dish, slowly boil sauce ten minutes on range. Skim off fat from surface of gravy, then pour contents of pan over ribs and serve.
A short braise dressed up with two classical sauces. The hinge is the beef itself: the total cooking time here is barely half an hour, so the ribs must be thick, tender cuts and the finish judged by internal temperature, not the clock.
- "Cotes" and the cutCôtes de boeuf: two single bone-in rib steaks, cut one bone thick. A modern bone-in ribeye or short-cut prime rib steak is the same thing. No weight or thickness is given; expect to serve two generously, four if carved off the bone.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe uses three of them — claret, demi-glace, tomato sauce — so 1 1/2 cups of liquid total.
- ClaretPeriod English for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red does the work. The recipe reduces the wine in the covered pan for ten minutes before the two sauces go in.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, assumed to be standing ready in a professional kitchen. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced beef stock substitutes; do not use bouillon cube broth, which will taste thin and salty against the tomato.
- Larding porkStrips of firm back fat threaded through the meat with a larding needle to keep lean beef moist. Well-marbled modern ribeye does not need it, and a larding needle is a specialist tool; the step can be skipped without harm.
- "Half a bean garlic"Half a clove; "bean" most likely renders the French gousse. That is a restrained amount for four shallots and a handful of herbs, and worth respecting.
- Oven heatNone is given. A brisk oven, 400–425F, suits a twelve-minute finish. Pull the ribs at about 125–130F internal for medium rare; they will carry over several degrees while the sauce boils down.
- The carrotsTwelve new carrots means small, young whole ones, sliced. Full-size supermarket carrots are starchier and denser — use about 3/4 lb, sliced thin, or they will still be firm when the beef is done.
- Finishing the sauceTen minutes at a slow boil after the meat comes out concentrates the gravy; skim the fat off before pouring, as instructed, or the shallots and tomato will read as greasy rather than sharp.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his cookbooks translate that restaurant's French repertoire into instructions a household cook could follow — which is why a dish this straightforward still assumes a pot of demi-glace and a larding needle within reach. The name keeps its French skeleton (côtes de boeuf) while shedding its accents, a common fate for menu French in American books of the period. "New carrots" places the dish in early summer, when young roots were briefly available and worth naming on a menu; before year-round shipping, the vegetable was as much of a seasonal announcement as the beef was a luxury. The pairing of demi-glace with tomato sauce is textbook late-nineteenth-century saucework, the tomato supplying acid and color that a brown sauce alone lacks.