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Salt, Pepper and Nutmeg (II)
Macaroni Croquettes for garnish.
Cut the fillet into slices about a quarter of an inch thick, beat them a little with a wet knife, and stamp or cut some rounds out of them about two inches in diameter. Cut as many thin round slices of marrow as you have fillets, blanch them and keep them till required.
Remove the skin and fat from the trimmings of the fillet, cut up small and pound in a mortar till smooth, add suet and marrow (about half the quantity of the meat), pound together thoroughly, mix in the yolks of two eggs, season with pepper, salt, and a little nutmeg, and rub through a wire sieve. This is the beef farce.
Season the fillets, put a thin slice of blanched marrow and a slice of truffle on each, placing a thin layer of beef farce between each. Put a thin slice of bacon as near as possible the size of the fillets on the top of each fillet thus prepared; press slightly together. Cover over completely with a thin layer of farce. Chop the trimmings of truffle finely, dip the fillets in white of egg, sprinkle the surface with chopped truffle. Melt the butter in a sauté-pan; when hot put in the fillets and broil over a quick fire for a few minutes, then cover with a buttered paper and finish in a hot oven.
When done take up, dress in a row on a small bed of mashed potatoes. Sauce over with wellreduced tomato or piquante sauce, garnish the sides with fried macaroni croquettes, and serve hot.
This is a Victorian composed entrée — beef fillet médaillons layered with marrow, truffle and a forcemeat, sealed in bacon and finished in the oven. The text as printed opens mid-thought because the ingredient list has been lost from the page, so several quantities have to be inferred.
- The hinge: build cold, cook fastThe stacks of fillet, marrow, truffle and farce hold together only if everything is thoroughly chilled before the final coating. Assemble, refrigerate at least 30 minutes, then sear; warm farce slides off in the pan.
- FarceFarce is simply forcemeat — pounded raw meat bound with egg. The recipe's proportion is suet and marrow together equal to about half the quantity of the pounded beef trimmings. A food processor replaces the mortar, but still press it through a sieve or fine strainer; the smooth texture is the point.
- "Broil over a quick fire"In this period "broil" in a sauté pan means what we call searing over high heat, not overhead grilling. Then buttered paper (parchment) and what the recipe calls a hot oven — no temperature is given in the book, but that is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F — for a few minutes more.
- MarrowMarrow drawn out whole from beef bones sawn by the butcher, then cut across into rounds. Blanching means a minute or two in simmering salted water to firm it and draw out blood, then cool in cold water. It will melt away entirely if the fillets are overcooked.
- SuetFresh beef kidney suet from a butcher, not the boxed shredded suet sold for puddings, which is dusted with flour and often vegetable-based.
- TruffleThe recipe assumes truffle cheap and plentiful enough that the trimmings could be chopped for a coating, which it no longer is. Thin slices of fresh or preserved black truffle work; failing that, a firm dark mushroom gives the look but not the perfume, and the dish loses its reason for being.
- Butter quantity"Melt the butter" refers to an amount given in the missing ingredient list. Enough to film a sauté pan generously, roughly 2 oz, is consistent with the method.
- Sauce and garnish"Well-reduced" is the operative word for the tomato or piquante sauce — it must nap the meat, not pool. Macaroni croquettes are cooked macaroni bound in a thick béchamel, chilled, cut, crumbed and fried; a separate recipe in books of this type.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities, so any yield is a guess: allowing about three rounds a head, the number of servings depends on how much of the trimmed fillet is wide enough to stamp two-inch rounds from.
This belongs to the late-nineteenth-century grande cuisine that British "high-class cookery" manuals taught to professional and upper-servant cooks: a plain cut of meat disassembled, enriched with marrow and truffle, rebuilt into uniform rounds, and set up on a bed of mashed potato so it reads as architecture on the platter. The technique is generally traced to Carême's inheritance by way of the London club and country-house kitchen, where filet de boeuf à la financière and its many cousins were assembled by the dozen. Bone marrow is the tell of the period — said to have been cheap and abundant while butchers broke down whole carcasses, and prized for the way it lubricates lean fillet from the inside. Truffle trimmings chopped as an exterior coating point the same way: tinned truffle is often said to have been common enough in professional kitchens of the 1880s and 1890s to be used decoratively. What can be observed is the mismatch between the page's title and its content.