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St. Gotthard Sauce
Press through a sieve into a bowl the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, then set bowl on ice, add half a teaspoon French mustard, six chopped tarragon leaves, one finely chopped mint leaf, half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, three saltspoons salt, half a saltspoon cayenne and two tablespoons vinegar. Sharply mix with whisk one minute, then pour in, drop by drop, three-quarters gill good cold olive oil, sharply whisking while adding it. Add tablespoon of capers, gently mix. Pour into a sauce bowl and serve. FILET OF BEEF, LARDED, WITH FRESH MUSHROOMS Neatly trim off fat and skin from a two-and-a-half-pound piece filet of beef. Cut an ounce larding pork in small strips one inch long and with a larding needle lard top of the filet. Place a mirepoix in a roasting pan, lay filet on top, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, spread tablespoon melted butter over the filet, then set in hot oven thirty-five minutes, turning once in a while. Remove, dress filet on a hot dish and keep hot. Peel, clean thoroughly, wash and dry half a pound of fresh sound mushrooms. Place in a sautoire with a tablespoon butter and half teaspoon salt, and cook ten minutes. Arrange around the filet. Pour a gill of demi-glace in the mirepoix pan, boil for five minutes. Strain it through a Chinese strainer over the filet and serve.
Two items run together here: a cold hard-yolk emulsion in the gribiche family, and a larded roast filet with mushrooms. The measurements are Delmonico's kitchen shorthand, and the sauce hinges entirely on how slowly the oil goes in.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so three-quarters gill of oil is 6 tablespoons and a gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, half a saltspoon of cayenne is 1/8 teaspoon.
- The oil, drop by dropSieved hard yolk is a far weaker emulsifier than raw yolk, and the vinegar goes in first, so the mixture is already thin. Add the oil literally in drops for the first third, whisking hard, before moving to a thin stream. Chilling the bowl, as directed, helps it hold.
- French mustardSmooth Dijon, not a grainy or an American-style yellow mustard. Half a teaspoon is a seasoning here, not a flavor lead.
- Larding porkFresh unsmoked pork fatback, cut in thin lardons and threaded through the meat with a larding needle. Salt pork rinsed and dried will do; blanched thick-cut bacon changes the flavor. If you have no larding needle, tie a thin sheet of fatback over the top instead and the roast will still baste itself.
- Hot ovenRoughly 425-450F. Thirty-five minutes for a 2 1/2-lb center-cut filet lands near medium-rare, but thickness varies more than weight does; pull at 125-130F internal and rest 10 minutes before slicing.
- Mirepoix and demi-glaceThe recipe does not say what goes in the mirepoix; in this period it is generally a bed of diced onion, carrot and celery, sometimes with herbs and pork trimmings, there to keep the meat off the pan and to flavor the deglazing. Demi-glace is a reduced brown sauce built on veal stock; a good reduced beef stock is the practical stand-in, and a jarred concentrate should be diluted well before it goes in the pan.
- Pans and strainersA sautoire is a straight-sided shallow saute pan. A Chinese strainer is a chinois, the fine conical sieve; any fine-mesh strainer works, pressed with a ladle to get the juices out of the vegetables.
- MushroomsDo not wash and dry them if you can avoid it. Wipe them, quarter or slice, and cook in a hot pan so the water drives off; ten minutes in butter over gentle heat will stew rather than brown them.
- YieldThe sauce makes about three-quarters of a cup, enough for six. The filet serves four to five as a main course. The two items are separate recipes that happen to run together on the page; the sauce is a cold one and nothing in the text pairs it with this roast.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a sauce or garnish was named for a place the way a railway car was, and the St. Gotthard is the Alpine pass on the route between central Switzerland and the Ticino, whose rail tunnel opened in 1882 and which was by the turn of the century one of the best-known routes in Europe. The sauce belongs to the same family as sauce gribiche and sauce tartare: hard-cooked yolk worked with vinegar and oil into a cold emulsion, sharpened with capers and a chopped-herb mixture; whether the mint is meant as a local signature is guesswork. Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, built the book as a survey of national styles for American households, so the geographic labels do real work here, telling a reader what a dish is supposed to taste like when no other description is offered. The larded filet that follows is classical roasting of the same moment, when beef tenderloin was routinely threaded with pork fat.