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Pan Broiled Fillets of Beef
Have fillets of beef cut one and one-half inches thick; shape in circular forms. Broil ten minutes in a hissing, well-buttered frying pan, turning every ten seconds for the two minutes, that the surface may be seared thoroughly, thus preventing the loss of juices. Turn occasionally afterward. When half done season with salt, pepper, reduce heat and finish cooking. Arrange on hot serving platter and spread generously with soft butter. Pour over Sultana Sauce. (For recipe see Page 61.)
A straightforward pan-broiled tenderloin steak, with one instruction that modern testing has vindicated and one that it has not. Read the timing before you start.
- Fillet of beefThis is beef tenderloin, cut into what a butcher today would call filet mignon or tournedos. A 1.5-inch cut runs roughly 6-8 oz; one way to hold the "circular forms" the recipe asks for is to tie a loop of kitchen twine around the circumference, though the recipe does not specify how.
- Ten minutes is too longA 1.5-inch tenderloin over high heat reaches medium-rare at an internal 130F in roughly 6-8 minutes total, depending on the pan and the starting temperature of the meat. Ten minutes plus the finish described here lands at medium-well to well done. Cook to temperature with an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock.
- Turning every ten secondsThis sounds fussy but is sound. Frequent flipping keeps neither face on the heat long enough to overshoot while the interior climbs steadily, and it produces browning at least as good as a single long sear. The text says "every ten seconds for the two minutes" within a ten-minute broil, which is muddled; treat frequent turning as the method for the whole cook.
- A hissing panMeaning preheated until fat shimmers and a drop of water skitters and vanishes. Cast iron or heavy carbon steel holds that heat when cold meat hits it; thin nonstick will not.
- Butter in the panWhole butter scorches around 300F, well below the heat wanted here. Start in a neutral oil or clarified butter and add whole butter in the last minute or two, basting with a spoon. The finishing butter spread on the platter is the recipe's real butter flavour and should not be skipped.
- Season earlier, not halfwayThe recipe salts only when the meat is half done; the older reasoning usually given for this was that early salting draws out juices, though the text does not say so. Salt at least 40 minutes ahead, or immediately before the pan, both of which season more evenly. Pepper is best added late, as it burns on a very hot surface.
- Rest before saucingGive the fillets five minutes on the warm platter before the sauce goes over. Sultana Sauce, referenced on page 61 of the original, is a raisin-based brown sauce; any well-reduced pan sauce with sultanas plumped in it serves the same purpose.
Tenderloin was a fashionable cut on the American table in the early twentieth century, small, boneless, quick to cook and expensive enough to signal an occasion. "Pan broiling" is a term that has largely fallen out of use: it meant cooking in a dry or barely greased hot pan rather than under or over a live fire, the stovetop substitute for the gridiron in kitchens that had gone over to coal and gas ranges -- though this recipe calls for a well-buttered pan. The insistence that a hard sear "prevents the loss of juices" was standard doctrine at the time, generally traced to the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the mid-nineteenth century, and it has since been disproved; searing browns and flavours, but seared meat loses moisture much like any other. The frequent turning the recipe demands, however, turns out to be genuinely good technique for reasons its author did not have. Sultana Sauce, with its raisins and brown stock, resembles the sweet-savoury garnishes that American cookbooks of the period borrowed from French practice.