Entrées
BEEF.
THE fillet, or undercut of the sirloin, is the part most used in the preparation of entrées. It is cut in little slices and dressed as- Filets de bœuf à la Française-broiled, and served with Maître d'hôtel butter and fried potatoes. à la Châteaubriand - broiled, and served in Châteaubriand sauce.
They may be served aux cerises or aux orangeswith a compote of cherries or of oranges in the centre of the dish; à la Tartare-with Tartare sauce; or with any dressed vegetable, and are named accordingly. à l'Italienne-floured, fried, and served in Italian sauce. à la Russe-sauté, and served with horseradish sauce. à la Périgueux - served with tomatoes and Périgueux sauce. à la Pompadour-served with a slice of tomato ENTRÉES. and a tiny pat of Maître d'hôtel butter on each fillet, and a garnish of Spaghetti macaroni with cheese in the centre of the dish.
Filets de bœuf à la St. James-spread with foie-gras or liver forcemeat, sauté, and served with a garnish of mushrooms and cherries. à la Carlsbad-served with a compote of cherries, and a brown sharp sauce with horseradish and currant jelly. à la Réforme-covered with slices of bacon, breadcrumbed, with chopped ham mixed with the crumbs, and fried; served with Reform sauce. à la Nemours-covered with forcemeat and slices of ham, breadcrumbed and fried; served with a white sauce. à l'Ostende spread with an oyster sauce, breadcrumbed and fried; served in a brown sauce with anchovy. au chasseur-larded, soaked in marinade, and braised; served with brown sauce and currant jelly. à la Grande-Bretagne-larded, split, and stuffed with macaroni and horseradish sauce; served with a brown sauce and potato chips.
Petits filets de bœuf à la Riga are rolled fillets, stuffed with bacon and forcemeat, braised, and served with peas and a brown sauce, garnished with slices of tomatoes.
Grenadins de bœuf à la Financière are little fillets, larded, braised, and served with a Financière garnish.
Everything on this page is the same piece of meat. The fillet, or undercut of the sirloin, is the tenderloin, cut into small slices, and the twenty names that follow are twenty garnishes.
- What to ask forBeef tenderloin, or filet. The little slices are what a butcher now calls tournedos or filet mignon, cut from the middle of the muscle, and the tapering tail end is where the rolled and stuffed petits filets on this page come from.
- ChâteaubriandThe page treats it as a sauce, which is how the word was used here. A modern menu means a thick cut from the head of the fillet, for two, and the shift is worth knowing before ordering one in either century.
- Maître d’hôtel butterButter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and salt, rolled in paper, chilled, then cut in coins and laid on the hot meat. It appears twice on this page and it is the one element of the chapter that has never gone out of use.
- Fruit with beefCherries, oranges, currant jelly, French plums. This is not one eccentric dish but a third of the page. The sharp-sweet garnish was doing the work a modern cook hands to a red wine reduction, and it does the work well.
- À la RéformeNamed for the Reform Club in London. The sauce is a sharp brown one; the useful part is the coating, breadcrumbs mixed with chopped ham, which improves any crumbed cutlet and is the piece of this dish worth copying exactly.
- Spaghetti macaroniMacaroni in this book is a general word for dried pasta, which is why the page has to write Spaghetti macaroni to specify the long thin kind. Where macaroni stands alone, no particular shape is meant.
Read the names and you are reading a directory: a London club, a Bohemian spa, a royal mistress, Ostend, Riga, St James, Great Britain itself. The system was that a garnish, once fixed, became a word, and the word then travelled on menu cards without its recipe attached — which is exactly why a book like this had to exist. Underneath the directory sits a plain commercial fact. An entrée kitchen of this kind used only the undercut of the sirloin, a single muscle of a few pounds from a carcass of hundreds, and the rest of the animal went to the removes, the stews and the servants’ table. The variety on this page is not abundance. It is one small expensive cut multiplied twenty times by garnish, for a course whose purpose was to be looked at.