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Entrecotes, Pojarsky
Neatly trim and flatten two tender sirloins beef of one and a quarter pounds each. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Heat a light tablespoon butter in a frying pan, place the steaks in the pan, one beside another, and cook for eight minutes on each side. Remove, place on a dish, pour the gravy over the steaks and keep hot. Prepare the same quantity of noodles and arrange around the sirloins. Place an ounce of butter in a small saucepan, with two tablespoons of fresh bread crumbs, and toss on the fire until a nice golden colour; pour over the steaks and noodles and serve.
A plain pan steak dressed in the Pojarsky manner, which here means a shower of butter-fried crumbs. Two points need attention: the cut, and the cooking time, which will take a thick steak well past where most cooks want it.
- The crumbs are the dishEverything else is a steak and noodles; the golden butter-fried crumbs are what makes it Pojarsky. Use dry-ish fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, keep them moving in the foaming butter, and pull them off the heat while they are still light gold — they carry on browning in the hot pan.
- "Entrecotes ... sirloins"The French entrecôte is cut between the ribs, closer to what a modern butcher sells as ribeye or a boneless rib steak. The book's "sirloin" may reflect looser older English usage rather than the American sirloin steak. Either cut works; ask for two steaks of about 1 1/4 lb each, which will be somewhere around 1 1/2 inches thick.
- Eight minutes a sideSixteen minutes in butter over the kind of heat butter will tolerate puts a steak of this size well past medium. For medium-rare, a thick steak of this weight wants roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side in a hot pan and then a 5-minute rest; go by an instant-read thermometer at 125-130F rather than the clock.
- Butter alone will burnA light tablespoon of butter under two large steaks at searing heat will brown past the point of pleasure. Either start in a neutral oil and add the butter for the last two minutes, or use clarified butter.
- "Pour the gravy over"There is no gravy made here — the word means the buttery pan juices and whatever the meat releases. Tip the pan, spoon it over, and if the fat has darkened, deglaze with a spoonful of water or stock instead.
- "The same quantity of noodles"This is genuinely ambiguous. Read literally it is 2 1/2 lb of noodles, far too much; the sense is almost certainly enough cooked noodles to ring the platter, which for four people is about 8 oz dry egg noodles.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of paprika across two steaks is for colour and a faint sweetness, not heat. Use sweet Hungarian paprika and make sure it is fresh — stale paprika tastes of dust and nothing else.
- YieldTwo steaks of 1 1/4 lb each, with noodles, serve four generously. The recipe itself gives no number of servings.
The Pojarsky name is generally traced to the Pozharsky tavern at Torzhok, on the road between Moscow and St Petersburg, whose minced veal or chicken cutlets — bound, shaped and coated in bread crumbs — became famous in Russia in the nineteenth century and passed into the international restaurant repertoire. In its usual form the name attaches to a minced, crumbed cutlet; here it has been carried over to a plain steak, with the crumbs rather than the mince doing the work, which is the sort of loose usage grand hotel menus of the period allowed. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book, alongside noodles rather than potatoes, is characteristic of the pre-war grand hotel style, in which a dish's nationality was often a matter of garnish and the cook was expected to recognise the name without being told where it came from.