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Stuffed Onions for Tournedos à la
Moscovienne. Peel eight to ten medium-sized onions; parboil them in salted water with a small piece of butter.
Drain on a cloth and cool. Carefully scoop out the centre part of each onion, and chop very fine with about half its quantity of mushrooms. Put the chopped onion and mushrooms in a stewpan with a handful of breadcrumbs. Season with pepper, salt, and a little grated nutmeg; moisten with a little Espagnole sauce; mix well, and stuff the centre of the onions with this sauce. Place them in a buttered sauté-pan; sprinkle the top with fresh breadcrumbs; put a small piece of butter on each one, and bake in a moderate oven a golden colour. Time to bake, about half an hour.
Tournedos de Bœuf à la Napoléon. (Little Fillets of Bœuf à la Napoléon.) Ingredients.
Two to three pounds of Fillet of Beef.
Two ounces of Butter.
Four ounces of Calf's Liver.
One ounce of Foie-gras.
Two ounces of cooked Tongue.
One ounce of fat Bacon.
One Shalot (finely chopped).
The page runs two entries together: a complete recipe for the stuffed onions, then the opening ingredient list of a separate tournedos dish that is cut off mid-page. Only the onions can be cooked from what is here.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (175C); the book gives no figure, only "a moderate oven". The onions are already parboiled, so the half hour is about heating the stuffing through and browning the crumb topping rather than cooking the onion.
- Espagnole sauceA brown mother sauce of veal stock, brown roux, mirepoix and tomato, cooked down for hours. Only a spoonful or two is needed here, purely to bind the stuffing. A well-reduced demi-glace or a thick reduced beef stock does the same job.
- Parboil, do not softenThe recipe gives no time; a few minutes in salted water, just until the outer layers yield, is the aim. If the onions go floppy you cannot scoop a clean cavity without the walls collapsing in the pan.
- Hollowing them outCut a slice from the top, leave two or three outer layers as the shell, and take out the core with a melon baller or a small teaspoon. Trim the root end flat so they sit upright.
- A misprint in the text"Stuff the centre of the onions with this sauce" -- read as the stuffing mixture or farce. Either the word is a slip for "mixture", or "sauce" is being used loosely for the savoury filling; the Espagnole is only the moistener.
- MushroomsPlain white or chestnut mushrooms, chopped very fine. Cook the chopped onion and mushroom in the stewpan until the liquid has gone, or the filling will be wet and slump.
- Sauté-panHere it means a shallow ovenproof pan, buttered, used as the baking dish. Any low-sided metal roasting pan or gratin dish works.
- YieldEight to ten onions serve eight to ten as a garnish, one per plated portion of tournedos. As a vegetable course on its own, allow two.
- The fragment belowThe tournedos à la Napoléon list stops at the shallot; the method and any remaining ingredients presumably continue overleaf. Beef fillet, calf's liver, foie-gras, tongue and bacon point to a forcemeat or gratin spread rather than anything you can reconstruct by guess.
Tournedos, the small rounds cut from the trimmed centre of a beef fillet, became a fixture of restaurant cookery in the later nineteenth century, and the classical repertoire attached dozens of named garnishes to them. Each name signalled a fixed accompaniment, which may be why a book of this kind places a stuffed-onion recipe beside the tournedos rather than among the vegetables. "À la Moscovienne" or "à la Russe" was applied loosely to dishes thought Russian in character, though the connection is often more fashion than geography.