How to cook Steak a la Toulouse

Speaker: Henri liked cooking, it was one of those strange things that the Lautrec men shared one of their enthusiasms. It's one of the light cooking too. He liked it so much that after he died, his dealer and friend Maurice Joyant brought out this book, The Art of Cuisine full of the recipes of Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec and it's got stuff in it like cooking heron and squirrels which I can't do. They are too complicated or you can't get the squirrels these days. But I will cook something for you that is a Lautrec family recipe. It's been handed down through all the generations, it isn't actually in the book, but it's the simplest one I could find by him and it's called in the family Steak Ala Toulouse. Now, what you need three nice entrecôtes like these, which I bought earlier in the village butcher, and you take these entrecôtes and you put lots and lots of pepper on them and the recipe is in my quote, smother the steak with mustard. So I am smothering, I couldn't really smother more.

Once you've smothered these three steaks, which I am a bit nervous about doing to be honest because I am actually in the kitchen in his mother's château in Malromé where Henri used to cook. His mother bought this château just to be independent and free really of out forms in 1883 and Henri used to come down whenever his mother was out of Paris and he cooked for her, he cooked for all his friends, invited them around for dinner and they loved coming.

Anyway. Once you put all this mustard on the three steaks, this is what I guess, all you have to do is pile them up one on top of the other. Make sure the mustard really soaked in. Pile them up like that, and then, right, you get your grill pan, now this one I have got here. You put the whole lot on like that and you shove it on the fire, the fire has to be made of wine wood, not any other wood, it has to be wine wood. You put your three steaks on, and you wait, till they cook. Smells nice, so there you are, Steak Ala Toulouse.

Now, the thing about this is, once you've cooked your three steaks, you take the top one and throw it away, you take the bottom one and throw it away because according to Henri, the only one that's perfectly cooked is the one in the middle.

So is it -- and when Henri was cooking, he liked to drink of course, we all do. And as his recipes got longer and more complicated, the more he drank until eventually he drank so much that he fall asleep and his friends would never get served their dinner.

Mustardy but it's very nice, Steak Ala Toulouse.