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Steaks, Tartare
Pass twice through a chopping machine two pounds lean filet or tender sirloin of raw beef, place on a plate. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then mix well. Divide in six even parts and roll each part into oval shape, place on a large cold dish. Make a little fountain in centre of each on top and carefully place in an egg yolk.
Thoroughly clean twelve even leaves lettuce, then divide a medium finely chopped onion over three leaves. Place a teaspoon capers over three other leaves, garnish three other leaves with teaspoon finely chopped vinegar pickles and then evenly divide tablespoon finely chopped parsley over last three leaves. Neatly arrange alternately around dish and send to table.
The dish is raw beef, ground and then held on a cold plate with a raw egg yolk sitting in it. That combination is the whole problem, and it cannot be resolved by adjusting the method.
- Grinding moves the risk insideBacterial contamination on beef sits on the outer surface, where searing would destroy it. Passing the meat twice through a grinder distributes anything present throughout the mass, and nothing here ever reaches a temperature that kills it.
- E. coli O157:H7This organism was not identified until the 1980s and needs a very small dose to cause illness, including kidney failure in children and older adults. Raw ground beef is its principal vehicle. No amount of care with a domestic grinder addresses it.
- The raw egg yolkShell eggs can carry Salmonella inside the egg, not merely on the shell, so washing the shell is no safeguard. A yolk placed in a hollow of raw meat and taken to table is a second uncooked animal-protein risk laid on top of the first.
- Time at room temperatureThe meat is ground, seasoned, shaped by hand into six portions, plated, garnished with twelve dressed lettuce leaves and then sent out. A "large cold dish" is not refrigeration, and that whole sequence is time spent in the range where bacteria multiply fastest.
- If you want the dishSteak tartare is still served, but only under controls a home cook does not have: whole muscle handled to a documented standard, trimmed and cut to order, and pasteurised egg. Use a current, professionally sourced recipe rather than this one.
The name points at the Tartars, the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the steppe, and the old story that their horsemen tenderised meat under the saddle and ate it uncooked is repeated everywhere but documented nowhere; treat it as legend. A likelier route, though it remains a proposal rather than a settled fact, is culinary rather than ethnographic: French professional cooking has a clear printed record of chopped raw beef under this name from the early twentieth century, in Escoffier — sent out with tartar sauce or its components, capers, onion, parsley, chopped pickle — with the garnish suggested as the source of the name. That is close to the plate described here, with the four condiments each given their own lettuce leaves and arranged alternately around the meat. The confidence with which Filippini's book hands a cook two pounds of raw filet and six egg yolks is a good measure of how differently the period understood the safety of fresh meat.