No. 1391
Grenadins of Tenderloin, Previllot
Grenadins de Filet de Boeuf a la Previllot
A characteristic Ranhofer entry: three lines that assume you own the rest of the book. Before starting, read No. 1384 for the grenadins themselves and No. 749 for the salpicon, since almost all the work lives there.
- What a grenadin isA grenadin is a thick, squat scallop of tenderloin, cut across the fillet and usually larded on top with fine strips of salt pork. In Ranhofer's usage it is generally braised and glazed rather than grilled, though the method here is only given by reference to No. 1384. It is commonly likened to a small fricandeau in treatment.
- Larding is the pointLarding with salt pork is generally what distinguishes a grenadin from a plain medallion, and the fat helps baste the lean tenderloin and gives the glazed top its striped look — but check No. 1384 for what Ranhofer actually specifies. Barding a strip of fatback over the top is the nearest practical substitute if you have no larding needle.
- The salpicon carries the dishA salpicon is an assembly of ingredients cut into small even dice and bound with a reduced sauce, spooned over or around the meat. Ranhofer's Previllot version is defined only at No. 749, and there is no way to reconstruct its contents from this page — look it up rather than guess.
- Croutons"Croutons of bread fried in butter" here means slices cut from a firm white loaf, trimmed to half-heart shapes matching the meat, and fried until crisp on both sides. Ranhofer specifies only butter; clarified butter is a practical modern choice if you are frying hot.
- Braising liquid and glazeThe cooking method is not given here: it comes from No. 1384. Where grenadins are braised and glazed, it is the final reduction basted over the meat that produces the lacquered surface.
- DonenessTenderloin has very little connective tissue to break down, so there is nothing to be gained from long cooking; cook to your preferred internal temperature and treat the braising liquid as a basting and glazing medium.
- YieldRanhofer gives none. Two grenadins per person for a main course, one for a course within a longer menu, is a reasonable modern guide.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads less like a cookbook than like a professional reference index: hundreds of entries exist, as this one does, purely as a recombination of a base preparation and a named garnish. The word grenadin is generally traced to the same root as grenade, and the connection is often said to lie in the studded, pomegranate-seed appearance of a larded surface, though that explanation is folk tradition rather than established fact. Names like "Previllot" are usually taken to reflect a house habit of christening a garnish after a patron, a colleague or an occasion; Ranhofer supplies dozens, and their origins are mostly unrecoverable now, which is itself a fair picture of how a large restaurant kitchen of the period generated variety ot cross-multiplying a fixed repertoire of cuts against a fixed repertoire of sauces and salpicons.