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Larded Sirloin, San Juan
Trim the fat and skin from top (only) of meat of a two-and-one-half-pound piece of a tender sirloin of beef, and with the aid of a larding needle lard the surface with thin strips of larding pork. Lay a mirepoix in a roasting pan, place the beef on top, season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper, lightly baste the top with a little melted butter, then pour a half gill water into the pan and set to roast in oven for forty minutes, turning and basting it once in a while. Remove, dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, pour in one gill demi-glace and one tablespoon sherry, and boil on the fire for five minutes. Strain through a Chinese strainer into a saucepan, add two sweet red peppers cut in small squares, boil for five minutes, arrange the stuffed cucumbers around the filet, pour the sauce into a bowl and send to the table separately.
A short roast of sirloin dressed in the Escoffier manner, with a garnish and sauce that the book assumes you can already make. Most of the work is in the two things it does not spell out: the oven temperature and the stuffed cucumbers.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, but forty minutes for a 2 1/2 lb piece means a hot oven — 425-450F. Cook to an internal temperature rather than the clock: 125-130F for rare to medium-rare, then rest 10 minutes before carving.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. The half gill of water in the pan is 1/4 cup, and the gill of demi-glace in the sauce is 1/2 cup.
- Larding porkFresh pork fatback cut into long strips (lardons) and drawn through the meat with a larding needle. Neither the needle nor unsalted fatback is easy to come by; barding — tying a sheet of fatback or thin-sliced unsmoked bacon over the top — gives most of the benefit on a roast this short.
- MirepoixHere it means the raw aromatic bed only: roughly diced onion, carrot and celery, often with a bay leaf and thyme, laid under the meat to flavour the pan juices. It is not eaten, and it is strained out with the sauce.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened in the classical kitchen with espagnole. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; a thin canned beef broth will not, and the sauce will taste watery.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve will do, pressed with a ladle to get the juices out of the vegetables.
- Sweet red peppersRed bell peppers, or the peeled canned pimientos available in this period. Add them after straining, as written, so they stay distinct in the finished sauce.
- The stuffed cucumbersThey arrive in the last line with no recipe attached — Filippini expected you to turn to his separate entry for them. Peeled cucumbers cut in lengths, hollowed, blanched, filled with a forcemeat and braised is the standard treatment. Plan them ahead or leave them out.
- YieldA 2 1/2 lb sirloin serves four to six. The sauce goes to the table in a bowl, not over the meat.
Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) collects the repertoire of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it follows the nineteenth-century restaurant habit of naming garnished dishes after places, patrons and current events. San Juan almost certainly points to San Juan Hill, the July 1898 engagement in Cuba that made Theodore Roosevelt a national figure; American menus of the following decade are thick with dishes named for the Spanish-American War, and the red peppers and sherry in the sauce read as a nod to Spain and the Caribbean. The naming is a fashion rather than a documented dedication, so treat the connection as the likely one rather than a proven one. The technique underneath — larding a lean cut, roasting it on a mirepoix, finishing the pan with demi-glace — is straight classical French practice, which is what Delmonico's sold to New York.