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Roast Fillet of Beef
Trim a small fillet of beef weighing about four pounds into shape. Lard the upper side and sprinkle with salt, pepper and dredge with flour. Sprinkle small cubes of fat salt pork thickly over the bottom of a dripping pan, set a wire trivet or rack on pork and lay meat on trivet. Place in a very hot oven at first, to sear over surface. Baste every five minutes for the first fifteen minutes, then several times after during the cooking. If liked rare, it should cook thirty minutes; if medium, allow thirty-five to forty minutes. Serve with Brown Mushroom Sauce (see Page 167) using fat in dripping pan.
A straightforward high-heat roast of a whole beef tenderloin, written before thermometers were common in home kitchens. The timings are the part to treat with suspicion.
- What a "fillet" isThis is the whole beef tenderloin, trimmed of silverskin and the chain muscle. Four pounds trimmed sits at the upper end of the usual range for a whole tenderloin, though the original calls it "small." Tuck and tie the thin tail end under so the piece cooks evenly.
- Oven temperature"A very hot oven" in books of this period is generally taken to mean somewhere around 450-475F. The recipe says only "at first," without stating whether or when to lower the heat; if you hold it high throughout, the surface will darken fast.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThirty minutes for rare is a guess that depends entirely on the thickness of the roast and its starting temperature. Pull at 120-125F in the thickest part for rare, 130-135F for medium; carryover adds several degrees while it rests. Tenderloin is unforgiving and goes from rare to grey in a few minutes.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of pork fat through the meat with a larding needle, a tool few kitchens have now. Draping thin sheets of fatback or a few slices of bacon over the top (barding) achieves the same protection for a lean cut; remove them for the last few minutes if you want a browned surface.
- Salt pork in the panThe cubes scattered under the rack are there to render and give you basting fat, not to be eaten. A "dripping pan" is simply a shallow roasting pan; the wire trivet keeps the meat out of the fat so it roasts rather than fries.
- BastingOpening the oven every five minutes bleeds heat and works against the searing the recipe asks for. Two or three bastings over the whole roast is plenty, and with barding fat on top you can skip it.
- RestingNot mentioned, as usual for the period. Rest the roast loosely covered for 10-15 minutes before carving, or the juices will run out onto the board.
- YieldFour pounds of trimmed tenderloin serves about eight. Carve across the grain in thick slices.
- The sauceBrown Mushroom Sauce is a separate page in the original (page 167), so its method is not given here; the recipe only directs you to use the fat in the dripping pan. Pour off all but two or three tablespoons of the rendered pork fat before you start it, or it will be greasy.
Roast fillet is often said to have been a Sunday centrepiece of the well-off American table in the 1910s: a lean, quick-cooking, expensive cut that could be got from oven to platter in half an hour and carved without skill at the table. The larding instruction reflects a practice common in the cookery of the period, since a tenderloin has almost no internal fat and cooks in earlier eras were taught to insert some. 52 Sunday Dinners is one of a large family of early twentieth-century books organised as a year of complete menus, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted a plan rather than a collection, and its cross-references to sauces on other pages reflect that menu-first structure.