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Mutton Steaks, Colbert
Procure three mutton steaks from a tender leg of mutton, of three-quarters of a pound each, make a few incisions around the skin, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, arrange in the steaks one beside another and cook for six minutes on each side. Lift them up, dress on a hot dish, skim off fat from pan, then pour a Colbert sauce into the gravy, mix well, pour sauce over steaks and serve.
A plain pan-fry whose whole character depends on the sauce named in the title, which the recipe assumes you already have to hand. A few of the assumptions behind it need spelling out.
- The sauce is the dishSauce Colbert is a meat glaze or demi-glace finished off the heat with butter, lemon juice and chopped tarragon; some kitchens of the period used the compound butter (beurre Colbert) instead, melted into the pan gravy. The recipe simply names the sauce and assumes you have it, so make or source it before the steaks go in the pan -- building a meat glaze takes far longer than the twelve minutes the steaks need.
- Mutton, and what to buyMutton is sheep over about two years old, darker and stronger-flavoured than lamb and rarely sold in general markets today. Leg steaks cut from lamb are the practical substitute; if you can get true mutton from a halal butcher or a farm supplier, it will want the longer end of any cooking time.
- "Incisions around the skin"This means cutting through the band of fat and silverskin at the edge of the steak at intervals. Without it the connective tissue contracts and the steak buckles into a dome, so only the centre touches the pan.
- Six minutes a side is a lotThree-quarter-pound leg steaks cut about an inch thick will be well past medium at twelve minutes total in a hot pan, and leg is lean enough to go dry. Modern practice would pull them at 130-135F internal for lamb and rest them; the original timing suits the period's taste for mutton cooked through.
- One tablespoon of butter, three big steaksThat is a bare film of fat for well over two pounds of meat. Use a wide heavy pan so the steaks are genuinely side by side and not crowded, or cook in two batches, otherwise they steam in their own juices and never brown.
- Skimming and mounting the sauceTip or spoon off the rendered fat but keep the browned juices, then add the sauce off direct heat and swirl rather than boil. A butter-finished Colbert will split if it is brought back to a hard simmer.
- YieldThree steaks of twelve ounces each serves three generously, or four if the meat is carved off the bone and portioned onto the plates.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) collects the grand-hotel repertoire he cooked from at Delmonico's in New York, which is why an unremarkable pan-fried steak arrives with a French surname attached. Sauce Colbert is generally traced to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though the attribution is honorific rather than documented and the sauce as codified belongs to the nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen, where tarragon, lemon and meat glaze were the standard finish for grilled or fried meats. The choice of mutton rather than lamb is the period speaking: mature sheep was ordinary butcher's meat in 1900 and lamb the seasonal luxury, an arrangement that has since reversed almost completely in English-speaking markets.