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Entrecotes, Sauce Poivrade
Neatly trim and flatten two one-and-a-quarter-pound cuts sirloin of beef. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, repeatedly turn steaks in the seasoning, arrange on a broiler and broil for eight minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, pour a Poivrade sauce over and serve.
A plain grilled steak whose whole character rests on a sauce the recipe assumes you already know. Two points need attention before anything else: what an entrecôte actually is, and how long eight minutes a side really cooks a steak.
- The sauce is the dishSauce poivrade is not simply peppered gravy. It is a classic brown sauce built on a mirepoix sweated in fat, deglazed with vinegar and white wine, reduced with espagnole or a strong veal stock, and finished with cracked black pepper added only in the last few minutes. Pepper boiled in the sauce from the start turns harsh and bitter, which is why the classic method adds it late and strains immediately.
- Entrecôte versus sirloinAn entrecôte is properly the cut between the ribs — what a butcher today would sell as a ribeye or rib steak. The recipe substitutes sirloin, which works but is leaner and less forgiving of long cooking. Either is fine; use whichever your butcher cuts thick.
- "Broiler" hereIn a book of this period the broiler is likely a hinged wire gridiron held over coals or set on the range, or the broiler compartment of a gas range, rather than a modern overhead electric element. A heavy cast-iron grill pan or a charcoal grill reproduces the intended crust; an oven broiler will not brown as aggressively.
- Eight minutes a sideThat timing suits a steak an inch and a half or more thick over moderate coals. On a modern grill at high heat, a 1¼-pound steak of ordinary thickness will be well past medium in sixteen minutes total. Cook to an internal 130–135F for medium-rare and let the clock follow the thermometer.
- The oil and seasoningTurning the steaks repeatedly in oil, salt and pepper on a plate seasons and coats them in one motion. It still works; if you have time, salt the meat forty minutes ahead and add the oil just before it meets the fire.
- Rest before saucingThe recipe sends the steaks straight to the hot dish. Give them five minutes on a warm platter first, then pour the sauce over — otherwise the juices thin and dilute the poivrade.
- YieldTwo steaks of 1¼ pounds each will serve about four generously, carved across the grain rather than served whole.
Entrecôte means literally "between the ribs," and in nineteenth-century French butchery it named the boneless meat lifted from between the rib bones of the forequarter — a cut prized for grilling because it carried enough intramuscular fat to survive an open fire. Sauce poivrade belongs to the older family of sharp, vinegar-based brown sauces that Carême and later Escoffier codified; it is the same base that, enriched with game trimmings and blood or cream, becomes sauce chevreuil or grand veneur for venison. Its ancestry is generally traced to the medieval peppered sauces served with roast meat, when pepper was expensive enough to be the point of the dish rather than a background note. A volume of this kind printing a French restaurant plate beside home cooking is doing what such books did constantly, and this entry plainly assumes the reader could find the sauce recipe elsewhere in the book.