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Mutton Steaks, Marchand De Vin
Have your butcher saw off from a tender leg of mutton three nice mutton steaks of three-quarters of a pound each. Neatly trim off the skin all around them. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, well divided all over.
Heat in a large frying pan half ounce melted butter, place the steaks in the pan and fry for eight minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Add to the gravy in the pan half a medium-sized, finely minced white onion, stir and cook until a nice light brown, then add half teaspoon flour, stir briskly, pour in half gill claret, half gill tomato sauce, half gill demi-glace, adding half teaspoon chopped chives or parsley and one clove sound, finely crushed garlic. Mix well with a wooden spoon and let reduce to half the quantity. Then pour over the steaks and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry with a reduction sauce built in the same pan. The two things standing between this and a modern kitchen are the meat itself and the demi-glace.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton is sheep over about two years old, stronger in flavor and firmer than lamb. Few butchers stock it; leg-of-lamb steaks cut about an inch thick, three-quarters of a pound each, are the practical substitute and will taste milder.
- Cooking timeEight minutes per side suits a thick mutton steak, which benefits from being cooked through. Lamb of the same thickness will be medium-rare at about four to five minutes a side in a hot pan; go by internal temperature -- roughly 130-135F for medium-rare, 140-145F for medium -- rather than the clock.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 2 fluid ounces. The sauce therefore starts from 2 oz each of claret, tomato sauce and demi-glace and reduces to roughly 3 fluid ounces total.
- ClaretIn this period claret means red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red works; avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked, since the sauce is reduced by half and concentrates whatever is in the glass.
- Demi-glaceClassically equal parts espagnole sauce and brown stock, reduced by half, and kept as a standing item in a professional kitchen of the day. Use good commercial demi-glace concentrate, or a dark beef or veal stock reduced until it is syrupy, in the quarter cup the recipe asks for.
- Butter and the panHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, which is thin coverage for a large skillet and three steaks. Use enough fat to keep the pan from scorching, and pour off any excess before starting the onion so the sauce does not break.
- "One clove sound garlic"Sound means firm and unsprouted; a sprouted or soft clove turns bitter in a reduction. Add it with the wine rather than the onion so it does not scorch in the hot fat.
- YieldThree steaks of three-quarters of a pound each will serve three generously, or four if carved off the bone and fanned onto plates. Rest the steaks in a warm place while the sauce reduces and add any collected juices to it.
Marchand de vin -- "wine merchant's" sauce -- is one of the standard red-wine pan sauces of nineteenth-century French cooking, built on shallot or onion, red wine and a brown sauce base; the name is conventionally explained by association with the wine trade, though that is tradition rather than documented origin. Filippini, long a manager at Delmonico's in New York, wrote from a restaurant tradition in which demi-glace was a standing preparation, which is why he can call for a quarter cup of it as casually as he calls for parsley. The choice of mutton rather than lamb is the period's other tell: mature sheep was ordinary butcher's meat in America and Britain well into the twentieth century, valued for its assertive flavor, and a robust wine reduction was exactly the sauce it wanted. Mutton fell out of the English-speaking market over the middle of the twentieth century, and the same cut is now sold almost exclusively as lamb.