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Porterhouse Steak, Adirondack
Procure a nice, tender porterhouse steak one and a quarter inches thick. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, rub it all over with a tablespoon oil, broil for twelve minutes on each side, remove, dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Peel six medium, sound white onions, clip off a piece at both ends, cut in two crosswise, lay on a tin cut side up, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper equally divided. Mix on a plate an ounce butter, two tablespoons bread crumbs, a half bean chopped garlic and teaspoon chopped parsley, then spread this butter over onions equally. Set in oven thirty minutes or until a good golden colour, basting with their butter once in a while, remove and arrange around the steaks. Prepare a potato pailles, place them at each end of dish, spread a little maitre d'hotel butter over steak and serve.
N. B. The onions should be set in oven before preparing steaks.
A steakhouse plate from the Delmonico school: one thick steak, a baked onion garnish, straw potatoes and a compound butter. The only figure that needs rethinking is the broiling time.
- Broiling timeTwelve minutes a side will take a 1¼-inch porterhouse well past well done. Under a modern gas or electric broiler set as high as it goes, figure 4-6 minutes per side for medium-rare and go by an instant-read thermometer at 125-130F in the thickest part of the strip, away from the bone. The long time suggests either a less concentrated fire than a modern broiler or a taste for meat cooked through, though the recipe itself says neither.
- Resting"Remove, dress on a hot dish and keep hot" is a rest in disguise. Five to eight minutes loose on a warm platter is right; the onions will still be finishing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in recipes of this date. Cut-side-up onion halves under a crumb butter want 375-400F for the stated thirty minutes to brown without scorching the crumbs.
- "A half bean chopped garlic"Filippini's "bean" is a clove. Half a clove for twelve onion halves is deliberately restrained; a full clove is not out of keeping.
- Lay on a tinA rimmed sheet pan. The rim matters here, since the butter runs off and you are told to baste with it.
- Potato paillesPommes pailles, straw potatoes: raw potato cut in fine matchsticks, rinsed and dried, then fried in deep fat until crisp. Sold now as shoestring potatoes if you would rather not fry.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled into a roll and sliced. Put it on at the table, not while the steak rests, or it melts to oil in the platter.
- Sequence and yieldThe closing note is the instruction that matters: onions into the oven first, since they need thirty minutes and the steak, whether at the original twenty-four minutes or the shorter modern time above, needs less. One porterhouse of this thickness with the garnish serves two generously, three at a stretch.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and in this recipe Adirondack means the baked crumbed onions and straw potatoes, not anything specific to the mountains. Porterhouse itself is an American cut name, generally traced to the nineteenth-century porterhouse — a tavern selling porter and a plate of beef — and it describes a steak cut from the rear of the short loin, towards the sirloin, carrying both the strip and a piece of the tenderloin on either side of the T-bone. The whole plate is a period argument about what a steak dinner should be: the meat plain and simply broiled, all the flavour built around it in the garnish and the finishing butter, which is why The International Cook Book can devote a page to one steak and still spend most of it on the onions.