Home › Fish › Breadcrumbs and Nutmeg
Breadcrumbs and Nutmeg
Choose a nice piece of the tender fillet of beef; remove all the sinews and fat; cut into even-sized oblong slices; flatten a little with the cutlet-bat, and lard them with small strips of larding bacon, raw ham, and truffles, in alternate rows. Place these tournedos in a flat stewpan; cover them with a few slices of fat bacon and half a sliced onion, a sliced carrot, and a small bunch of savoury herbs; season with pepper and salt; moisten with the white wine and beef stock. Cover, and cook briskly over the fire from fifteen to twenty minutes. Drain the tournedos, remove the bacon, add the Espagnole sauce and horse-radish to the stock. Let all reduce well, and strain into a small stewpan.
Remove all fat, and finish the sauce with a pinch of castor sugar and an ounce of fresh butter worked in bit by bit; keep the sauce warm. Glaze and dish up the tournedos; garnish with alternate groups of button mushrooms, previously warmed in well-reduced stock, and medium-sized stuffed onions. Pour the sauce over the garnish (not over the meat), and serve.
A grande-cuisine braise of larded fillet steaks, written for a kitchen that already had stock, Espagnole and a larding needle on hand. The recipe gives no quantities, so read it as a method and scale it to the number of tournedos you cut.
- The hinge: the sauce never touches the meatThe final instruction is the point of the dish. The tournedos are glazed so the larded surface stays bright and the sauce is poured over the mushrooms and onions around them. Sauce over the meat dulls the glaze and makes the larding look sodden.
- Larding, in practice"Lard them with small strips" means threading strips of fat through the surface of the meat with a larding needle, in visible alternate rows of bacon, ham and truffle. It is decorative as much as functional. Without a needle, the effect can be approximated by piercing with a thin skewer and pushing the strips in, though the rows will be less even.
- Cutlet-batA flat metal or wooden bat for flattening meat; a meat mallet's flat face or the base of a heavy pan does the same. Flatten only slightly "a little" here means evening the thickness, not thinning the steak.
- "Briskly over the fire, fifteen to twenty minutes"That is a covered braise over direct heat on the stovetop, and at that length it will take fillet well past pink. If you want the tournedos rosy, cook for the shorter end of the range and rest them while the sauce reduces; expect them medium at best.
- Espagnole sauceA brown sauce of veal or beef stock, mirepoix and roux, simmered and skimmed for hours; a professional kitchen of this period would have kept it standing. A well-reduced brown stock or good demi-glace stands in. The recipe gives no quantity; since the braising liquor is reduced with it, err on the side of a small amount.
- Castor sugar and the butter finishCastor sugar is superfine sugar; a pinch, not a sweetening. The butter is worked in off the boil, a piece at a time, to thicken and gloss the sauce. If it boils after the butter goes in, it will split.
- Horse-radishFresh grated root, added to the reducing stock rather than at the end, so it perfumes the sauce without the raw bite of a table condiment. Bottled horseradish in vinegar is not the same thing; if you use it, add less and expect a sharper sauce.
- Truffles and the garnishThe truffle here is for the larding rows, so a small amount of fresh or good preserved black truffle goes a long way. The recipe asks only for "medium-sized stuffed onions" and gives no method; the usual period treatment is to peel and hollow them, parboil, fill with a forcemeat or duxelles and bake, which means starting them well before the meat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or number of servings; scale it to the fillet you have, allowing one stuffed onion and a small group of mushrooms per person.
Tournedos the word is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth-century Paris kitchen, and its origin is disputed in French cookery writing itself are round or oblong slices from the trimmed fillet, and they became a fixture of the restaurant and country-house menu precisely because they cook fast and can be dressed up. This version belongs to the high Franco-British professional style that dominated grand English kitchens: Espagnole from the stockpot, larding needle work in contrasting rows, a mounted butter sauce, and a garnish arranged in "alternate groups" so the plate reads as composition. The horseradish is the interesting note, being an English and Central European taste for beef rather than a French one, and its appearance in a sauce built on Espagnole makes for a hybrid dish: a French kitchen carrying an English flavour.