FROM THE ARCHIVES:Monica Sheridan became a household name in the early 1960s with her cookery programme on Telefís Éireann but was already known for her no-nonsense "Good Food" column in The Irish Timesof which this is an example. – JOE JOYCE
THE DIFFERENCE between Haute Cuisine and Domestic Economy is mainly a question of presentation – and, of course, of £. s. d.
Take an ordinary fillet steak. Cook it on the edge of the tongs over a clear fire or on an old-fashioned iron grid, and no chef can do better. That is home cooking at its best, a simple, clean job without any frills or pretensions, using the best available materials.
When the Haute Cuisine gets its hands on a steak you have entrecôte marchand de vin – a steak which is grilled and garnished with a red wine and butter sauce. This sauce is made by boiling together a couple of glasses of red wine and a few shallots until the wine has reduced to half its bulk and the shallots are tender.
You then add lumps of butter and keep stirring over the heat till the sauce has thickened. At the end you add a spoonful of lemon juice and salt and pepper to flavour. But, though this tastes very nice, the great chef will never let a sauce out of his kitchen that has any visible sign of the original ingredients in it. He is probably afraid that anyone might copy his creation. All the high-class sauces are put through a tamis so that they come to the table as smooth as velvet.
Another thing they do with a steak is to serve it with a brandy sauce and a garnish of crushed peppercorns.
The chef who invented that diabolical concoction was, I hope, goullotined [stet] at the revolution, together with all his seed, breed and generation.
It was obviously thought of as a cover-up for a steak that was so “high” that it could have walked to the table under its own steam, without any help from waiter or salver.
No matter how carefully you try to eat the steak, you end up with a mouthful of peppercorns which burns your tongue and cauterises your throat. Put a lighted match to your breath and flames will shoot out as from a blow-lamp. You will walk around giving a fair impression of the human dragon.
Then there is the Bearnaise steak. This is a thinnish steak grilled and garnished with a Bearnaise sauce and fried potatoes.
There must be hundreds of different ways of treating a steak in the great kitchens of the world, but to my mind they are no improvement on the home-fire method, so long as you know your butcher and your tongs.
Before we leave the subject of steak, let me warn you that sometimes, in the best places, you are served what purports to be a fillet steak from prime beef, and is in actual fact a cow-fillet.
This meat comes from the abattoirs of the meat packers and belongs to a grandmother cow who has retired from the dairy business and has ended her days in a can.
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