Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Fillets of Beef, Mushroom Sauce
Fillets of Beef, Mushroom Sauce
Have half a dozen slices cut crosswise from a neatly trimmed fillet of beef. The slices may be cut of any thickness desired, but from half to three-fourths an inch is preferable for chafing-dish cookery. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter in a hot blazer; lay in the meat, and cook four or five minutes, turning every ten seconds. The heat should be well maintained throughout the cooking.
Season with salt when half cooked. In another blazer make a cup of brown sauce; brown two tablespoonfuls of butter, add four tablespoonfuls of flour, and, when this is well browned, add half a cup of very rich brown stock and half a cup of liquid from the mushroom can. Season to taste with Kitchen Bouquet, salt, and a few drops of tabasco sauce, then add half a bottle of mushrooms, cut in halves. Serve as soon as the mushrooms are hot.
A chafing-dish steak, written for a device that runs cooler than any stovetop burner. The whole success of it lies in getting the pan hot before the meat goes in and not crowding it.
- What a blazer isThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame (the water pan goes underneath only for gentle work). The recipe wants two of them going at once; a heavy 10-inch skillet and a small saucepan on the stove do the same job with more authority.
- Heat is the hingeAn alcohol or Sterno flame gives far less heat than a gas ring, so "the heat should be well maintained" means preheat the blazer until the butter is foaming and just colouring before the beef touches it. A cool pan will grey the slices instead of browning them.
- Turning every ten secondsNot fussiness. Frequent turning helps thin tenderloin slices cook evenly over a weak flame without a hard-seared crust. It works on a modern burner too, and four to five minutes on a half-inch slice lands around medium-rare.
- Fillet slices"Cut crosswise from a neatly trimmed fillet" means tenderloin medallions, half to three-quarters of an inch thick, so roughly 2 to 3 oz each depending on the diameter of the fillet. Ask for six tournedos or slice a center-cut piece yourself; pat them dry before they go in the butter.
- The sauce is thick by designTwo tablespoons butter to four of flour is a dry, sandy roux, and only one cup of liquid follows it. Expect something closer to a gravy than a sauce. If you want it nearer a modern demi-glace, hold the flour to two tablespoons and add stock until it coats a spoon.
- Canned mushroomsThe recipe refers both to a "mushroom can" and to "half a bottle," so this is a commercially packed product of unstated size; half a container of button mushrooms plus its liquid is the intent, and you will have to judge the quantity. Canned mushrooms are still sold, and the packing liquid is doing real work in the sauce; if you substitute fresh, saute them first and replace the canning liquid with more stock.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still on shelves in the same brown bottle. It is for colour and a faint roasted note, not seasoning; a scant teaspoon is plenty in a cup of sauce.
- YieldSix slices, so three servings as a light main course or six as a supper dish. The recipe gives no serving base; toast points or fried bread are a common chafing-dish accompaniment if you want one.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American cities around 1900, and this recipe belongs squarely to it: a spirit-lamp under a silvered pan, cooked at the table in a parlour or a college room where there was no kitchen. Fillet of beef with mushroom sauce is a drawing-room reduction of the restaurant tournedos, and the shortcuts here are the tell of the moment. Canned mushrooms, bottled tabasco and Kitchen Bouquet, a browning liquid marketed from the late nineteenth century onward, stand in for the long-simmered espagnole a professional kitchen would have had waiting. The result is a dish that reads as luxurious, uses the most expensive cut in the animal, and can be produced in ten minutes by a hostess with no fire but a flame the size of a candle.