Minute Steak with Peppercorn Sauce

There are evenings, usually Tuesdays, when you walk through the door and the day has been longer than it had any right to be, and what you need is not a salad, not a bowl of something virtuous, but a piece of meat cooked fast in a hot pan with a sauce you can mop up with bread. This is that supper.

Minute steak is an unfashionable cut. Thin, cheap, the sort of thing your mum might have fried with onions on a Wednesday. I think it's one of the most useful things in the butcher's counter. It cooks in the time it takes to set the table. The peppercorn sauce comes together in the same pan, built on the sticky, caramelised residue the steak leaves behind, loosened with brandy and enriched with cream. The green peppercorns are the point: softer and more fragrant than black, with a gentle heat that warms without scorching.

We're only making dinner. But this is the kind of dinner that makes you sit down properly, pour a glass of something, and feel like the evening has been rescued. I wrote it down in the notebook last October: steak, peppercorns, cream, rain on the window. It didn't need more than that.