No. 1384

Grenadins of Tenderloin Plain Five Ounces

Grenadins de Filet de Boeuf Nature de cinq onces Chaque

From a raw and well trimmed tenderloin of beef, cut lengthwise of the meat, half heart-shaped slices, five inches long by two and a half inches wide, and half an inch thick. Beat them lightly, trim evenly, and lard them on one side with rows of fine larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52). Season with salt and pepper. Put some fat or clarified butter in a saute-pan, and when very hot, lay in the grenadins on their larded side; four minutes later when a fine color, turn them over; it will take about eight or ten minutes to cook them rare. Serve on a hot dish, and pour some clear gravy over (No. 404).

← No. 1383 Double Chateaubriand, Two and a half Pounds Beef No. 1385 Grenadins of Tenderloin a la Beaumarchais →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward sauté of tenderloin steaks, complicated only by the larding, which is the step most modern cooks will want to think hardest about. Everything else is a matter of heat management.

What a grenadin isA grenadin is a thick, flattened, heart- or shield-shaped slice of tenderloin, larded on one face — the beef counterpart of the veal fricandeau, cut small. The five ounces of the title is the weight of each raw slice, so a tenderloin of about 3 lb yields roughly nine.
The dimensionsFive inches by two and a half by half an inch is a broad, thin cut. Cutting lengthwise of the meat rather than across it is what makes those proportions possible from a tenderloin, and it means the grain runs the long way; slice against it when serving.
Larding porkThis is firm back fat, cut into strips and drawn through the surface of the meat with a larding needle. Fresh back fat is a special order from a butcher; salt pork rinsed and chilled hard is the usual stand-in. Chill the strips until stiff or they tear as they go through.
"Very hot" fatThe pan should be at the point where the fat shimmers and just begins to smoke. A half-inch steak in a cool pan will grey through before it colours, and the larding is there to be browned.
The timingsFour minutes on the larded side, then a turn, with eight to ten minutes total for rare. That is generous for half-inch meat in a properly hot pan; check with a thermometer at 125F for rare rather than trusting the clock, and pull the grenadins while they are still yielding.
Clear gravy, No. 404Ranhofer's clear gravy is an unthickened brown stock jus, not a flour gravy. A good reduced beef or veal stock, or a light demi-glace loosened with stock, gives the same effect. Deglaze the sauté-pan with a little of it to catch the fond.
ServingServe one grenadin per person as a course, two as a main. The dish must be genuinely hot: thin larded slices lose their heat fast and the pork fat congeals unpleasantly on a warm plate.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house method of cataloguing: a single cut given a fixed weight, a fixed shape and a numbered cross-reference to its sauce, so that any cook on the line could reproduce it identically. Larding — threading strips of pork fat through lean meat — was standard practice in the nineteenth-century professional kitchen, partly for basting a cut that carries almost no fat of its own, and partly for the decorative rows of white lardoons that appear when the surface browns. It faded from home cooking, and the larding needle disappeared from ordinary kitchen drawers. Nature in the French title means plain, without garnish or elaborate sauce: this is the baseline against which the numbered variations that follow it, such as the Beaumarchais of No. 1385, were to be understood.