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Minced Beef, with Spanish Peppers
Cut from a tender, lean sirloin of beef of one and a half pounds twelve even, thin slices. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cut six Spanish red peppers in halves. Heat in a large frying pan two tablespoons melted butter, adding the peppers and fry for two minutes on each side. Lift up with a fork and keep hot on a plate. Place the beef in the same pan and briskly cook for one minute on each side. Remove the slices with a fork, arrange on a large dish, one overlapping another, place the peppers over them and sprinkle with teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Remove all the fat from the pan, add half gill red wine and half gill water. Season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper; toss well and let briskly boil for five minutes. Pour the gravy over the beef and serve.
Despite the name, nothing here is ground: "minced" is the old anglicization of the French émincé, meaning cut in thin slices. Everything cooks in about five minutes, so have the beef sliced, the peppers halved and the wine measured before the pan goes on.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The seasoning works out to about 1/2 tsp white pepper for the beef and a scant 1/8 tsp cayenne in the pan sauce.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. The sauce is 1/4 cup red wine plus 1/4 cup water, boiled hard for five minutes, which concentrates it considerably.
- Spanish red peppersMost likely fresh sweet red peppers rather than chilies, since cayenne is added separately in the sauce. The recipe says only to cut them in halves; thicker-walled peppers will want longer than the two minutes a side given here. Jarred piquillos are a reasonable stand-in and need only warming.
- Slicing the sirloinTwelve slices from a pound and a half means about 2 oz each, cut across the grain roughly 1/4 inch thick. Slightly frozen beef cuts far more evenly.
- One minute a sideThat timing assumes a genuinely hot pan and slices this thin, and it leaves the beef rare to medium-rare. Work in two batches; crowding twelve slices into one pan steams them grey.
- The pan saucePouring off the fat before deglazing is the point of the instruction "remove all the fat" — butter that has fried peppers and beef will otherwise break the reduction. Scrape the browned bits up as the wine goes in.
- Resting juicesBeef this thin sheds liquid on the platter within a minute. Tip whatever collects back into the reducing sauce rather than leaving it to dilute the finished dish.
- YieldTwelve slices and twelve pepper halves, so three of each per person for four servings. It wants bread, rice or potatoes, as there is very little sauce.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) gives this dish a Spanish name on the strength of its peppers alone.