Steak Diane: the perfect date-night dish

Cooking for romance is no laughing matter. The stakes are high. Get it right and woo the love of your life — lifelong happiness, marriage, kids. Get it wrong, and who knows what will happen? At best, you’re serving up a disaster sometime around midnight. You’re not getting lucky. You may be poisoning your intended.

Romantic meals should be for all year round, not just for Valentine’s Day — but there are a few rules that it’s wise to follow. Date night is not the time to try shucking oysters for the first time (unless you’re willing to risk a trip to A&E). Chocolate fondants, as dozens of disappointed MasterChef contestants will attest, are hard to pull off in a panic. What you need is something fun, something fast, something flashy. You want to wow them — but also spend less time cooking and more time wooing. I believe there is no better choice than steak Diane.

Sauce à la Diane became popular in the 19th century and was named after the Roman goddess of the hunt, Diana. It appears in Escoffier’s 1907 cookbook Le Guide Culinaire; it was made of cream, truffles and black pepper, and tended to be served with venison. The origin of its modern counterpart — creamy but truffle-less, served almost exclusively with beef steak — is less clear. As is the way with these things, various chefs from New York and London’s storied hotels and restaurants of the 1930s and 1940s have made a claim. Fair enough — who wouldn’t want to be famous for steak Diane?

Even the ‘modern’ dish is now firmly retro, thanks to changing fashions and restaurant economics. If you ordered it in the 1940s, it would have been prepared and flambéed tableside for you; today, there is no room, and the cut (fillet) is too expensive for most restaurants to make a decent margin.