As an instance of the use of maitre d'hotel sauce, here is the way to serve a Chateaubriand :

The Chdteaubriand is a beefsteak, a piece of fillet one and a half and even two inches thick, grilled and served with souffli potatoes and maitre d'hotel sauce; that is to say, you put on the dish in which you intend to serve your Chateaubriand a good lump of sweet butter kneaded with some very finely chopped parsley, salt, pepper, a speck of nutmeg, a suspicion of chives, and a drop or two of lemon-juice; melt the whole by warming the dish, mix, and then set your Chdteaubri-and in the middle of the dish, all hot from the gridiron; heap round it the souffle potatoes, using your fingers, and send up to table as quickly as possible.

A really triumphant Chateaubriand is two inches thick after it is cooked, and it is cooked rose right through ; the outside is neither burned nor dry; and when you cut it with the knife the red juice flows out and mixes with the maitre d'hotel, and makes it, as it were, something living and animated.

The inventor and baptizer of the Chateau-briand, I have been told, was Magny, and the name was given to it by mistake, for, according to Magny, it was christened, not after Chateaubriand, the author of the "Genie du Christianisme," but after a M. de Chabrillan, who is not otherwise famous.