Nick Bramham’s Steak au Poivre
Nick’s take on this Instagram-famous dish is every bit as delicious as its Parisian inspiration – and substantially cheaper than a Eurostar ticket.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today Nick Bramham details how to cook the perfect steak au poivre, ideal for special occasions when your budget can’t quite stretch to a weekend in Paris.
But first, some news! We’re delighted to announce that Stella Swain is the winner of the inaugural Food Stories Fellowship Award run by the British Library Food Season, in partnership with Vittles. Stella’s proposed article is an investigation into the 1934-1939 Land Settlement Association Government Scheme and what it can tell us about contemporary British farming. The fellowship will fund at least two weeks of research with the British Library and the final article will be published in Vittles. To read more about the award, and all the nominees, please see the BL’s site here.
If you’ve spent any time at all following Insufferable London Food People on Instagram – and if you’re reading this, then presumably you have – you’ll know that one of their favourite things to do of an idle weekend is to hop on the Eurostar to Paris and spend forty-eight hours bouncing between bistros and caves à vin, smashing bottles of natty wine as they go, punctuated by the occasional street-side jambon beurre or meticulously laminated pastry, all documented in real time on their stories.
You’ll also know that their very first port of call, despite its being a bit of a schlep from Gare du Nord, is Le Bistrot Paul Bert. If you don’t immediately recognise this hallowed dining room’s polished mahogany and claret-coloured banquettes, you’ll be familiar with its Bernardaud plates with ‘LE BISTROT PAUL BERT’ stamped around the perimeter in blood-red, on which food of a markedly better quality than your typical bistro fare is served.
The dish you can all but guarantee they will have chosen from the scribbled chalkboard menu? ‘Filet de boeuf au poivre de Sarawak’, an undeniably aesthetically pleasing plate of food comprising a thick bronze medallion of prime beef fillet in a pool of glossy cream sauce speckled with finely cracked black peppercorns. There’ll be a bowl of perfectly judged frites maison on the side. Maybe they’ll treat you to a cut-through shot of the juicy barely cooked steak, or a snap of a forkful of chips being dragged through the Caramac-coloured sauce, or of the bottle of Morgon 2020 they’re enjoying (cellar temp, natch).
Maybe, faced yet again with this horribly clichéd but undeniably appealing hyper-specific mise-en-scène, you’ll slam your phone down in a fit of covetousness and accidentally smash the screen. Maybe you’ll book the Eurostar yourself and pray the stars align to enable you to snag a famously elusive reservation at Le Bistrot Paul Bert. Or maybe, if you’re like me, you’ll take matters into your own hands and just make the bloody thing at home.
Time-rich and with something to celebrate, I got cracking. I’m lucky that I have an excellent butcher attached to the restaurant where I work. They hooked me up with a couple of well-aged fillet steaks. On the way home, I swung by the corner shop and purchased a tub of cream, a miniature bottle of Courvoisier, a bag of McCain oven fries (home-made frites are such a pain and not in the spirit of impulsiveness) and a round lettuce.
I didn’t put the steaks in the fridge when I got home; instead I seasoned them all over with fine sea salt and allowed them to cure and come up to room temperature, safe in the knowledge that this would yield a quicker and more even cook and ensure they were seasoned pretty much right to the core.
I patted the steaks dry and seared them in a little ghee in a medium-hot cast iron pan, turning regularly until they were nut brown all over. Then I added some butter to really boost the final stage of caramelisation, basting furiously as the burning milk solids exploded in plumes of golden foam. I transferred the steaks to a plate to rest, discarded most of the fat, and got to work on the sauce.