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Porterhouse Steak, Marchand De Vin
Procure a porterhouse steak from the short loin, one and a half inches thick. Lightly flatten and trim evenly all around. Season with a good teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the steaks, and gently fry for twelve minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish and keep hot. Add six finely chopped shallots to the pan and lightly brown for three minutes, pour in a gill claret, let reduce on the fire to half the quantity, then add a half gill each demi-glace and tomato sauce, one bean finely chopped garlic, half teaspoon each freshly chopped parsley and chives; lightly mix, let boil for eight minutes and keep hot. Wash, peel and cut three large raw potatoes into small square strips one inch long; wash again, drain and plunge in boiling fat for ten minutes, remove, drain, season with half teaspoon salt, then arrange around the steaks, pour the sauce over and serve.
A standard steakhouse plate of the period: pan-fried steak, a red-wine shallot sauce, and fried potatoes. The one thing to change is the cooking time.
- Twelve minutes a side is far too longA 1½-inch porterhouse given 24 minutes in a pan will be grey through to the bone. Sear it hard 4-5 minutes a side and pull it at 125-130F internal for medium-rare, then rest it 8-10 minutes while you build the sauce.
- Butter alone will burnTwo tablespoons of butter cannot hold the heat needed to brown a thick steak. Use a neutral oil for the sear and add butter in the last minute, or start the sauce in the same pan with fresh butter once the steak is out.
- A gillHalf a cup, so half a gill is a quarter cup. The sauce is ½ cup claret reduced to ¼ cup, then ¼ cup demi-glace and ¼ cup tomato sauce.
- One bean of garlicOne clove. "Bean" for a garlic clove turns up in some early twentieth-century American cookbooks working from French sources.
- Claret and demi-glaceClaret means dry red Bordeaux; any dry, moderately tannic red works. Demi-glace can be bought as a concentrate — use about a teaspoon of paste loosened with ¼ cup water rather than an equal volume of the paste itself.
- Eight minutes of boilingReduce at a simmer rather than a rolling boil, and finish off the heat with a knob of cold butter swirled in. Add the parsley and chives at the very end so they keep their colour.
- The potatoes"Boiling fat" for ten minutes in one go gives limp fries. Blanch the strips at 325F until tender but pale, drain, then fry again at 375F for two to three minutes to crisp. Salt them the moment they leave the fat.
- YieldOne porterhouse of this thickness and three large potatoes serve two generously, with sauce to spare.
Marchand de vin means "wine merchant" — the standard French name for a shallot-and-red-wine reduction, said by tradition to be the sauce a wine seller might make to show off his own stock. Escoffier codified it as a reduction of red wine with shallot, finished with meat glaze and butter; the tomato sauce and the fried potatoes here suggest an American adaptation, where a French sauce name signalled quality on an English-language menu. The porterhouse itself is an American cut, taken from the rear of the short loin where the tenderloin is thick enough to give both a strip and a filet in one piece, and by 1900 it was the standard grand steak of New York restaurant dining. Filippini's International Cook Book collects exactly this sort of dish: continental technique applied to American beef, written for cooks of the kind he had worked among during his career at Delmonico's.