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Tenderloin Cutlets, Cardinal
Finely chop up one and a half pounds fresh tenderloin of beef with four ounces fresh beef marrow. Place the hash in a tureen, adding a gill of cream. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Divide the preparation on a lightly floured table into six equal parts, give them nice cutlet forms, dip them in beaten egg, then lightly roll in bread crumbs. Heat two tablespoons lard on a frying pan, add the cutlets, one beside another, and slowly fry for eight minutes on each side. Dress crown-shaped on a hot dish and keep hot. Place six Spanish sweet peppers in the pan and briskly fry for two minutes on each side; arrange a pepper over each cutlet. Pour a gill of hot reduced tomato sauce around the cutlets, adjust a red, fancy-paper frill at the end of each cutlet and serve.
A chopped-steak cutlet dressed up in red for the table. The whole dish turns on the meat being chopped, not ground to paste, and on the marrow staying cold until it goes into the pan.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so half a cup of cream in the meat and half a cup of tomato sauce around the finished dish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That makes about half a teaspoon of cayenne for a pound and a half of beef, which is assertive but not extreme, and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg.
- Beef marrowFour ounces of marrow is the fat scooped from split marrow bones; a butcher will cut them lengthwise on request. Keep it refrigerator-cold and chop it in with the beef at the last moment, or it smears and the cutlets fry greasy instead of juicy.
- Chop, do not grindHand-chopping with a heavy knife, or a few short pulses in a food processor, leaves the texture the dish depends on. Standard fine-ground beef packs into something closer to a meatloaf patty.
- Tenderloin is optionalThe recipe wants tenderloin because it is chopping raw steak, but the marrow supplies the fat and the tenderness. Sirloin or chuck chopped by hand gives more flavour for a fraction of the price.
- Frying timeEight minutes a side is a long haul for a breaded cutlet of roughly four and a half to five ounces. Fry gently until the crumb is deep gold and the centre reaches 160F, which in a modern pan may come nearer five minutes a side.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely long red frying peppers rather than bell peppers, though the period term is also used for pimiento-type sweet peppers. Two minutes a side in the same fat blisters them; jarred piquillos, patted dry and warmed through, are a close shortcut.
- Reduced tomato sauceA plain tomato sauce cooked down until it coats a spoon. Pour it around the cutlets rather than over them so the crumb stays crisp.
- Yield and the frillsSix cutlets, so four as a main course or six as part of a longer meal. The paper frills are decorative only and belong to a period when a chopped-beef cutlet was made to look like a rib chop.
"Cardinal" in nineteenth-century menu French signals red, after a cardinal's robes, and the convention was flexible: in classic sauce work it means lobster butter, while here the red comes from the sweet peppers and the tomato sauce. The dish itself belongs to a long tradition of shaping chopped steak into a cutlet form, giving it a paper frill and serving it crown-shaped around a hot platter, so that chopped meat could arrive at the table with the silhouette of a chop. The marrow is the telling detail, a reminder of a time when a kitchen broke down whole carcasses and had marrow bones to spare. The crown arrangement, the frills and the pepper set squarely on each cutlet mark this out as service-style cooking written for a dining room rather than a family table.