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Fillet of Beef
Trim fillet into good shape. Lard it plentifully, letting the whole upper surface be perforated with lardoons. Place in baking pan thin slices of larding pork, over pork place layer of chopped onion, carrots, turnip, and celery; lay tenderloin on top. Pour in 1 cup stock, add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 4 sprigs parsley, 1 bay leaf, and 2 cloves. Bake in hot oven 30 minutes, and baste frequently. Remove when done; strain off gravy and skim off grease. Blend 1 tablespoon Crisco with 1 tablespoon flour in a pan, add gravy strained from pan, 1/4 cup grated horseradish, salt and paprika to taste and bring to boiling point, then add 2 tablespoons lemon juice and 1 tablespoon vinegar. Spread sauce on hot serving dish and lay fillet on it.
A whole beef tenderloin roasted on a bed of pork and vegetables, with a sharp horseradish pan sauce. Most of the work is in the larding, which is optional now, but the timing is the part that needs attention.
- Hot ovenIn this period "hot" means roughly 425-450F. That is the right range for a whole fillet, which wants a fast roast and a browned exterior.
- Thirty minutes is a guide, not a ruleA trimmed whole tenderloin in a hot oven will often need longer than the stated 30 minutes, and timing varies with weight and with the thickness of the head end. Cook to an internal temperature of 125-130F at the thickest point and rest 10 minutes; the original's "remove when done" assumed a cook who knew the feel of the meat.
- LardoonsLarding means threading strips of chilled pork fat through the meat with a larding needle, to keep a very lean cut moist. Modern beef is fattier and the roast is short, so it is not necessary; barding the top with thin sheets of fatback or bacon does the same job with none of the equipment.
- Larding porkThe sliced pork under the meat is fatback or salt pork. If using salt pork, cut the added 1/2 teaspoon salt back or leave it out until you taste the finished sauce.
- CriscoThis book was published to sell it. Butter works better in a horseradish sauce and one tablespoon of each is a small roux, so substitute freely.
- The sauce will be thinOne tablespoon of flour against a cup of stock plus the vegetable juices gives a light gravy, not a coating sauce. That suits a sauce spread on the platter under the meat, but reduce the strained liquid first if you want it heavier.
- HorseradishA quarter cup grated means fresh root, which is far hotter and cleaner-tasting than jarred. If using prepared horseradish, drain it and add the lemon juice and vinegar cautiously, since the jar already contains vinegar.
- Acid goes in lastThe recipe brings the sauce to boiling point before the lemon juice and vinegar go in. Prolonged heat drives off the volatile compounds that give horseradish its sharpness, so adding the acid at the end and not boiling the sauce further afterwards helps keep the bite.
- YieldA whole trimmed fillet serves 8 to 10. Carve across the grain in thick slices and serve the vegetables separately or discard them; they have given everything to the gravy.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned to establish Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, in American home kitchens; the recipes are conventional for their date and the shortening is inserted wherever a fat is called for, including places like this roux where butter would have been the obvious choice. The dish itself is straightforward French bourgeois cookery as filtered through the American hotel kitchen: a larded fillet roasted on a bed of aromatic vegetables is the standard treatment in Escoffier-era practice, and the horseradish sauce points to the older English and Central European habit of pairing beef with grated root. Larding was still a common enough skill in the period, and it is often suggested that beef sold to households was leaner and more variably aged than what a butcher case holds now, so that a whole tenderloin cooked without added fat could easily come out dry.