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Steak a La Bordelaire
Brown two tablespoonfuls of butter, add two tablespoonfuls of flour and brown again, then stir in gradually one pint of good beef stock. When thick and smooth add one tablespoonful and one-half of chopped raw ham, onehalf of a bay leaf and one teaspoonful of chopped onion. Cover and simmer gently for one hour, then strain. Add salt and pepper to taste, one tablespoonful of tomato catsup and cupful of finely chopped canned or fresh mushrooms and keep hot at the side of the fire. Broil a sirloin steak, arrange on a hot platter and pour the sauce around it.
This is a brown sauce built on a dark roux, finished with mushrooms and served around a broiled steak. The sauce is the whole job; the steak is straightforward.
- The hinge: brown the roux properlyBoth the butter and the flour are browned before any stock goes in, and that colour is the entire character of the sauce. Expect 8-10 minutes over medium heat, stirring, until the flour smells toasted and turns the shade of a walnut shell. Rushing it gives you a pale, pasty gravy.
- QuantitiesOne pint of stock is 2 cups. The mushroom measure reads "and cupful" in the original, most likely a dropped fraction from "one-half of a cupful"; a cup of chopped mushrooms in 2 cups of sauce is generous but workable, so use between a half cup and a cup to taste.
- Raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham, not fresh pork. Prosciutto, speck or a scrap of dry country ham all work; it is there to season the sauce and is strained out again, so use the trimmings rather than good slices.
- "Keep hot at the side of the fire"On a coal range the cooler edge of the top held things near a simmer without reducing them. The equivalent is the lowest burner setting or a covered pan in a 200F oven while the steak broils.
- The hour-long simmerNot padding. It is what cooks the raw flour taste out and concentrates the stock. Keep it barely bubbling and covered, and expect to lose some volume; thin with a little more stock after straining if it has gone past a coating consistency.
- CatsupTomato ketchup around 1900 was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than the modern bottle. A tablespoon of today's ketchup is sweeter; a spoonful of tomato paste plus a few drops of vinegar gets closer to the intent.
- The steakBroil under a preheated element or over hot coals, close to the heat, and pull it at 130-135F internal for medium-rare, then rest it 5 minutes before it goes on the platter. Pour the sauce around the steak as directed rather than over it, so the crust stays dry.
- YieldThe sauce makes roughly a cup and a half after straining, enough for a 1.5-2 lb sirloin serving three or four.
The name is a mangled bordelaise - "in the style of Bordeaux" - and the classical French version is a red wine reduction with shallots, thyme and a slice of poached beef marrow laid on the steak. What appears here is the Americanised form common in turn-of-the-century household books: an espagnole-style brown sauce given depth with cured ham and a bay leaf, then finished with canned mushrooms and a spoonful of bottled ketchup, with the wine dropped altogether. Canned mushrooms and commercial catsup were both widely available conveniences by this period, letting a domestic cook approximate a restaurant sauce without a stockpot running all day, and the substitution tells you a good deal about how French menu French reached the American table.