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Beef, Fillet of, with Mushrooms
Take a fillet of beef whole, and after trimming it into shape, make an incision into shape, make an incision into it length-ways, and insert a long strip of bacon previously rolled in finely chopped shallot and parsley and a good dusting of pepper. Tie up the fillet carefully with tape. Take a large slice of bacon, mince it very small with savoury herbs, a clove of garlic, and an onion; place this mixture in a little butter at the bottom of a stewpan, and when it melts put the fillets upon it, and let it brown. Pour in a pint of tomato sauce and a little rich gravy, and simmer for two hours. Strain off the sauce, place the meat upon a very hot dish, remove the tape, garnish with button mushrooms and fried parsley, and pour some of the sauce over. Probable cost, 5s.
A Victorian braise of a whole beef fillet, larded with bacon and finished in a tomato-based sauce. The method is sound, but the two-hour simmer belongs to an era that liked its beef cooked through.
- The two-hour simmerA whole fillet held at a simmer for two hours will come out uniformly grey and dry — this is a braise, not a roast, and the original expects well-done meat. Cooks who want the fillet pink should treat the aromatic bacon base and tomato sauce as the recipe's real contribution and either brown and roast the fillet separately, or use a cut built for long moist cooking, such as chuck or brisket.
- Text error in the original"Make an incision into shape, make an incision into it length-ways" is a compositor's duplication. There is one incision: a long channel cut down the length of the fillet to take the bacon.
- LardingThe strip of bacon is pushed into the channel with the handle of a wooden spoon or a larding needle. Use unsmoked streaky bacon or fatback; modern smoked bacon will dominate the shallot and parsley rolled around it.
- TapeNineteenth-century kitchens tied roasts with flat woven tape, as the recipe specifies. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals does the same job and is easier to cut away at the table.
- StewpanA heavy lidded casserole or Dutch oven just wide enough to hold the fillet. Too large a pan and the pint of sauce will not come up around the meat.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz (about 2.5 US cups). "A little rich gravy" means concentrated brown stock; a well-reduced beef stock stands in.
- Fried parsleyParsley must be bone dry before it goes into fat at around 350F, and it needs only a few seconds — it should stay green, not brown. Wet parsley will make the fat erupt.
- Button mushroomsThe recipe assumes they arrive cooked. Sauté them in butter separately and season them; dropped on raw they will weep onto the hot dish.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives neither weight nor number served; a trimmed whole fillet of roughly 4-5 lb would serve eight to ten. The 'probable cost, 5s.' is five shillings, an indication of how expensive fillet was relative to a period household budget.
A braise in the French manner: larding a fillet was a standard treatment of the period. Larding — threading fat through a lean cut — was usual with fillet, which carries almost no marbling, and the strip of bacon rolled in shallot and parsley does the work of both basting and seasoning from within. The pint of tomato sauce is worth noting: by the later nineteenth century a made tomato sauce was treated as something within a competent cook's reach. The costing in shillings, appended to entries throughout the book, points to a readership planning against a fixed household sum, and five shillings would have placed this among dishes for company rather than everyday eating.