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Larded Sirloin of Beef, Ottmann
Remove fat and trim skin from lean part of top of a three-pound piece tender sirloin of beef. Cut from a piece of larding pork twenty-four very thin strips an inch long, then with aid of a larding needle insert strips of pork on surface of meat and season all over with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper.
Place a mirepoix in a roasting pan, spread tablespoon melted lard over vegetables, then lay sirloin on top, baste with a little melted butter, set in oven for forty-five minutes, basting and turning once in a while. Remove, take up beef, dress on hot dish and keep hot. Skim fat off gravy, then place contents of pan in small saucepan, pour in two tablespoons sherry, half gill white wine, let reduce on open fire to a glaze, then add one gill demi-glace lightly mix and boil for eight minutes. Shift pan to corner of range, mix in little by little a half ounce fresh butter, briskly mixing meanwhile. Arrange fresh mushroom stuffing around sirloin, strain sauce into a saucebowl and send to table separately.
A straightforward roast built on two old techniques — larding and mounting a sauce with butter — plus one measurement system that needs translating.
- Gills and glassesA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and a gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup. Two tablespoons of sherry stays as written.
- No oven temperature givenThe book gives none; a hot oven, in the region of 425F, is a reasonable reading. Forty-five minutes for a three-pound piece will likely land somewhere between rare and medium-rare — go by an instant-read thermometer at 125-130F in the center rather than the clock, and rest it 15 minutes before carving.
- Larding porkThis is fresh unsmoked fatback or unrendered salt pork, cut into thin lardons and drawn through the surface of the meat with a larding needle. Modern sirloin is better marbled than 1900s beef and larding is now optional; if you skip it, drape the roast with a thin sheet of fatback or bard it with bacon so the lean top does not dry.
- MirepoixRoughly diced onion, carrot and celery — here it is a roasting rack and the base of the sauce, not a vegetable side. Cut the pieces large enough that they do not scorch in 45 minutes at high heat.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock thickened with espagnole sauce. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a well-reduced homemade brown stock does too, though it will be thinner. Avoid bouillon-cube substitutes, which will turn salty once the pan juices are reduced to a glaze.
- The hinge: mounting the butter"Shift pan to corner of range" means off direct heat. The half ounce (1 tablespoon) of cold butter goes in a piece at a time, swirled or whisked in, and the sauce must not boil again or it will break and go greasy.
- Fresh mushroom stuffingThe book does not define the term here. Most likely mushroom caps filled with a duxelles — mushroom stems and shallot chopped fine, cooked dry in butter, bound with a little breadcrumb — baked and set around the roast as a garnish.
- YieldThree pounds of trimmed sirloin serves four to six, with a small quantity of finished sauce — well under a cup — passed separately.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its habit of hanging a proper name on a garnish — Ottmann here — follows the restaurant convention of naming a plated composition for a regular customer, a colleague or an occasion. Who Ottmann was is not recorded in the book, and such attributions are generally best read as house shorthand rather than biography. The technique underneath is older: larding, the threading of pork fat through lean meat with a needle, was a common treatment for lean beef at a time when cattle generally carried less internal fat than a modern feedlot sirloin. The sauce follows the classical French sequence — deglaze, reduce to a glaze, add demi-glace, finish off the heat with butter — which reads as professional kitchen practice set down for domestic readers.