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Removes or Releves: Filet
It is roasted and served as Filet de bœuf rôti, and may have a vegetable garnish-Macédoine, Jardinière, or Printanière-and be named accordingly. Au jus d'orange, it has orange sauce. Filet de bœuf au macaroni is garnished with macaroni. à la Napolitaine-larded, roasted, and served in a savoury brown sauce with Tarragon vinegar, currant jelly, raisins and French plums. au jus de groseilles-larded, soaked in marinade and roasted; served in a brown sauce with currant jelly. piqué aux légumes printaniers-larded, roasted and glazed; served with young vegetables and brown sauce. à la Milanaise-larded, roasted, and served in white sauce with macaroni, etc. Served with macaroni dressed with tomato sauce and grated cheese, it is à la Romaine. à la Toscane-larded and braised; served with tomatoes and stuffed artichoke bottoms. à la Bohémienne-larded, soaked in marinade, and roasted or braised; served with fried slices of potatoes, and Poivrade sauce with pickled onions, pickled mushrooms, and olives; or cold, with tomato sauce, currant jelly, etc.
Braised, it is served as Filet de bœuf braisé; à la sauce Madère, it has Madeira sauce; à la Paysanne, it is garnished with vegetables.
A Round of beef as- Rouelle de bœuf bouillie is boiled; à l'Anglaise it is served with carrots and turnips and small suet dumplings.
A remove is a course that takes another course’s place on the table — the big joint carried in as the fish is carried out. This page is the beef end of it.
- Remove and relevéRelevé is the French for the dish that raises or replaces another, and the English remove says the same thing from the other side. Both words describe a physical act: one dish lifted off the table and the next set down in the gap it leaves.
- The whole filletThis is the only place in the book where the tenderloin is roasted entire instead of being cut up. A trimmed fillet is thick at one end and thin at the other, so fold the tail under and tie it, or one end is overdone before the other is warm.
- Soaked in marinadeThe marinade here is vinegar and water with onion and carrot, and the page gives no time at all. A day in the refrigerator is plenty. This is a sharp pickling liquid rather than an oil-and-herb marinade, and left longer it starts to cure the surface of the meat instead of flavouring it.
- GlazedRoasted and glazed means brushed with reduced stock until it shines, not sugared. A spoonful of well-reduced beef stock painted on at the end does the whole job.
- Carving a whole filletAcross the grain, which on a whole fillet means straight down in rounds, and not before ten or fifteen minutes off the heat. The page assumes somebody else does this at a sideboard, which is why a separate manual existed for the subject.
- Rouelle de bœufThe last line drops from roast fillet to a boiled round of beef with carrots, turnips and suet dumplings. Same course, same table, a fraction of the cost: the remove is where a house showed exactly what it could afford.
The word remove preserves a way of serving dinner that has otherwise disappeared. Under the older French manner, dishes were set out on the table together and guests helped themselves and each other from whatever stood within reach, so a course ended when its dishes were physically taken away and replaced — removed. The Russian manner that supplanted it sent each dish round in turn from a sideboard, carved and portioned out of the diners’ sight, and once that happened the table stopped being a display and became a surface. Books of this period sit on the seam between the two systems, which is why they still speak of removes and relevés while also assuming a servant with a carving knife somewhere off to the side. The last line of this page, with its boiled round and its suet dumplings standing in the same slot as a roast fillet, shows what the older arrangement was really for: everyone at the table could see what had been put in front of them.