Steaks Morateur with Seafood Cocktail Entree (by G)

Today I was looking through 1960's cookery magazine Cordon Bleu Cookery Course for inspiration. Rather than inspiration I got two whole recipes. In 1960's dinner party style I made an entree and a main. For entree we had a seafood cocktail - a mix of celery, lettuce, frozen prawns (as specified), preserved mussels and crab (the recipe called for tinned crab - I couldn't find that, though I didn't look too hard. We had cooked and defrosted king crab instead).  For flavour there was an awesome vinaigrette of chardonnay vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper and parsley.

The main was pretty simple. I made an anchovy butter by mixing anchovy and butter. Then it was just a matter of oven cooking some chip potatoes (as they called them in the 60's), boil some green beans (I added the rest of the cocktail vinaigrette for flavour) and fried off some very nice steaks in butter with fine chopped shallots and white wine.

 

 

Though the photo of the steaks is pretty bad I think it looks more appealing than the weirdly grey ones shown in the magazine. The flavours of the whole meal were great and, though I say it myself, the steaks were perfectly cooked to my liking.  I may have overcooked the chip potatoes slightly - I always have difficulty with those things. I know they need more than the 10 minutes listed on the packed but 1 1/4 hours was probably a bit too long.