No. 1387

Grenadins of Tenderloin a la Halevy

Grenadins de Filet de Boeauf a la Halevy

Prepare and cook the grenadins as for No. 1384. Plunge some good, sound tomatoes in boiling water, peel them, cut them crosswise in two, squeeze them without injuring their shape, and season them with pepper and salt. Heat some oil in an omelet pan, and when very hot, put in the halved tomatoes; cook them, then arrange them crown-shaped on a dish, lay a grenadin on each tomato and garnish around with stuffed mushrooms (No. 650). Serve a well reduced and well buttered half glaze sauce separately (No. 413).

← No. 1386 Grenadins of Tenderloin a la Boniface Beef No. 1388 Grenadins of Tenderloin As Venison, Poivrade →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a stocked larder, so this entry is mostly cross-references. Filled in, it is a straightforward dish of larded tenderloin medallions on sautéed tomato halves with a demi-glace.

What a grenadin isA thick medallion, here cut from the tenderloin, larded across the top with fine strips of salt pork or fat back, then braised or pan-roasted and glazed. The cooking method is carried over wholesale from No. 1384, which is not reproduced on this page. A 1½-inch tournedos handled the same way is the closest modern equivalent; skip the larding if you are working with well-marbled beef, but then baste with butter to compensate.
The cross-referencesNo. 650 is stuffed mushrooms; No. 413 is half-glaze, i.e. demi-glace: brown sauce reduced with stock until it coats a spoon. Neither recipe is reproduced here. "Well reduced and well buttered" is the whole instruction that matters; finish it off the heat with cold butter and do not let it boil afterward or it will separate.
Omelet panThis would have been a shallow, sloping-sided iron or steel skillet, not a nonstick omelette pan. Any heavy skillet that will take the tomato halves in one uncrowded layer works. "Very hot" oil is the point — the tomatoes should sear and hold their shape rather than stew down.
The tomatoes are the hingeBlanching, peeling, halving crosswise and gently squeezing out the seeds and juice is what keeps them from collapsing and flooding the plate. Squeeze over the sink with the cut side down and only enough to clear the seed pockets. Cook them cut side down first, three or four minutes, and move them with a thin spatula.
Ripeness matters more than it did"Good, sound tomatoes" in a nineteenth-century kitchen meant firm, in-season fruit. Watery, refrigerated supermarket tomatoes will slump. Use small, firm, meaty ones — plum or cocktail types halved crosswise hold up best.
Assembly and temperatureEverything is plated hot and separately cooked, so hold the tomatoes and mushrooms in a low oven, around 200F, while the beef rests. Serve the demi-glace in a sauceboat as directed; poured over, it slides off the tomato and pools.
YieldThe original gives none. Figure one grenadin, one tomato half and one or two stuffed mushrooms per person; a whole trimmed tenderloin gives eight to ten portions.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it runs to well over a thousand numbered preparations built to be combined by cooks who already knew the base recipes by heart — hence a dish described in four sentences that depends on three others. The name is often taken to honor Fromental Halévy, the French composer of La Juive, though the book does not name the honoree and the surname could equally point to the librettist Ludovic Halévy; naming garnishes after composers, singers and patrons was standard practice in the grande cuisine of the period, and Ranhofer's index is full of them alongside dishes named for American politicians and Delmonico's regulars. Grenadins themselves are an older French butchery term, and the practice of larding small cuts so that lean meat would baste itself during a long braise is sometimes offered as the rationale behind the name, though it is not a documented origin — a technique that made more sense with the leaner, grass-fed beef of the era than it does with modern marbled tenderloin. The tomato treatment here is worth noting too: by the 1890s the tomato was thoroughly at home in American restaurant cooking, and a crown of seared tomato halves was a fashionable way to give a brown, heavy plate some color.