Home › The World's Kitchen › Entrecotes, Sauce Picard
Entrecotes, Sauce Picard
Neatly trim and flatten two tender one-and-a-quarter-pound sirloin steaks, season all over with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and carefully rub them with a tablespoon oil. Arrange on broiler and broil for eight minutes on each side, dress on a hot dish, pour Picard sauce over and serve.
A two-line steak recipe from an era when the broiler was a coal or gas grill and steaks were cut thick. The only real decisions are thickness, heat and doneness.
- Entrecôte vs. sirloinEntrecôte properly means the cut between the ribs — what a butcher now sells as ribeye or rib steak. The recipe calls for sirloin; either works, but ribeye is closer to the name.
- Steak size and yieldTwo steaks at 1¼ lb each is 2½ lb of meat; the recipe gives no thickness. Sliced across the grain they serve four comfortably.
- The eight-minute ruleEight minutes a side under a modern overhead broiler will likely take a thick steak past medium. Cook to internal temperature instead: 125–130°F for rare to medium-rare, 135°F for medium, pulling 5°F early.
- Heat sourceA hotel broiler of this period was a hot grid over live coals or gas, radiating hard from below. A domestic oven broiler radiates from above and is weaker; preheat it fully with the rack 3–4 inches from the element, or use a cast-iron pan or grill for a better crust.
- Sauce PicardNot given here; the sauce is presumably a separate entry in the book, and by its name would be a brown sauce. Any well-reduced brown sauce with shallot and wine stands in; make it before the steaks so it is hot and waiting.
- RestingThe instruction to dress straight onto a hot dish and sauce it reflects service in a restaurant, where the plate travelled. Rest the meat 5–8 minutes loosely tented before saucing, or the juices run into the sauce and thin it.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across 2½ lb of beef is modest by current taste. Season generously and, if there is time, salt an hour or more ahead so it penetrates.
Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects the classical French repertoire as it was cooked in American hotel kitchens around 1906 — French names, French mother sauces, American cuts of beef. Entrecôte literally means "between the ribs," and the willingness to attach it to a sirloin steak shows how loosely the French terminology travelled once it crossed the Atlantic. Sauce names of this kind often point to a place, a person or a patron; Picard suggests Picardy in northern France, though in a book of this vintage such names are often traditional labels rather than regional recipes. The bare, telegraphic style is characteristic of the whole volume: the sauce lives in its own entry, and the cook is assumed to know where to find it.