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Broiled Tenderloin of Beef
Cut a slice from the tenderloin about an inch thick, wipe dry, and dust with pepper and salt. Grease well a gridiron, and broil the meat over a clear fire, turning every ten counts for three to five minutes. Spread with maitre d'hotel butter, and serve.
Broiled Tenderloin, Cheron Broil three tenderloin steaks, and place them on a dish on top of a gill of hot Bearnaise sauce, and put on each steak one hot artichoke bottom filled with hot Macedoine; then pour over just a small quantity of meat glaze, and serve.
Tenderloin, Florentin Three tenderloin steaks should be prepared exactly as for broiled tenderloin, Cheron, pour a gill of hot Madeira sauce over the steaks and garnish with three hot artichokes a la Florentin, and serve.
Three variations on the same steak, distinguished only by sauce and garnish. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the sauces by name, so most of the work is in the supporting parts.
- "Turning every ten counts"This reads as every ten seconds or so, not every ten minutes. Frequent turning over very hot coals does produce an evenly seared inch-thick steak; a grill pan or a hot outdoor fire both work.
- A clear fireCoals burned down to glowing red with no flame and no smoke. Flames on dripping fat give soot, not crust. Preheat a cast-iron grill pan until it is faintly smoking for the same effect.
- Three to five minutes totalFor a one-inch tenderloin steak over that heat, this lands at rare to bare medium-rare. Judge by an internal temperature of 125-130F rather than the clock, and let the meat rest three or four minutes before saucing.
- A gillHalf a cup. Both the Béarnaise and the Madeira sauce are measured this way, and half a cup is generous for three steaks.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Roll it in paper, chill firm, and cut a coin onto each steak so it melts at the table.
- Cheron and the saucesThe name is probably the classical Choron, a Bearnaise finished with tomato, though Oscar simply writes Bearnaise here. Meat glaze is glace de viande, brown stock reduced to a syrup; a spoonful of well-reduced demi-glace stands in.
- Macedoine and artichoke bottomsMacedoine is a small even dice of mixed vegetables, usually carrot, turnip, green beans and peas, cooked separately and warmed in butter. Artichoke bottoms are the trimmed bases of large globe artichokes; tinned or frozen ones save considerable work, and they must go on hot.
- FlorentineIn the classic repertoire the term generally signals spinach, so the artichokes are likely filled or bedded with buttered spinach rather than Macedoine, though this page does not say so.
- YieldThe first paragraph is one steak for one person; the two variations serve three.
The Waldorf's à la carte grill appears, on the evidence of this entry alone, to have worked from a short list of cuts and a long list of garnishes: one method for the meat, then a name for each combination of sauce and trimming. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, seems to have been written for readers who wanted hotel food at home, since it assumes they can already produce Béarnaise, Madeira sauce and a meat glaze from other pages rather than repeating them. Tenderloin was the fashionable American cut of the period, and the tiered garnish of artichoke bottom filled with diced vegetables belongs to the classic French repertoire codified in professional kitchens through the later nineteenth century. Names like Cheron and Florentine were presumably shorthand between cook and waiter, which may be why the recipe explains none of them.