No. 1393

Grenadins of Tenderloin with Round Potatoes, Valois Sauce

Grenadins de Filet de Boeuf aux Pommes de Terre en Boules a la Sauce Valois

Arrange and cook the grenadins as for plain (No. 1384), glaze and lay them on a piece of poached quenelle forcemeat shaped like a half heart. Cover with a Valois sauce (No. 554), surround the grenadins with round potatoes seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, previously fried in butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, chopped parsley and lemon juice.

← No. 1392 Grenadins of Tenderloin with Celery, Bechame Beef No. 1394 Grenadins of Tenderloin with Sweet Peppers →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: Ranhofer expects you to have his plain grenadins (No. 1384) and Valois sauce (No. 554) already in hand. What follows fills in the parts a modern cook has to reconstruct.

What a grenadin isSmall, thick medallions cut from the tenderloin, traditionally larded with fine strips of pork fat, cooked in liquid and reduced to a glaze rather than grilled. Ranhofer gives neither a size nor a number per person here; his method is at No. 1384.
Glazing"Glaze" here means basting the cooked grenadins with their own reduced cooking liquid until they take on a lacquered shine, done at the very end of cooking.
Valois sauceRanhofer's Valois is a bearnaise finished with meat glaze; the same sauce is more often catalogued today as Foyot. It is a warm emulsion: held too hot it will break, and a broken sauce is awkward to recover, so make it last and keep it in a warm bain-marie.
The quenelle baseA poached forcemeat crouton, cut half-heart shaped, serving as a plinth under each medallion. It is a pounded veal or chicken forcemeat bound with panade and cream, poached gently in a buttered mould until just set. A firm bread croute serves the same structural purpose if you are not making forcemeat.
Potatoes en boulesSeven-eighths of an inch is about 22 mm; a large melon baller or Parisienne scoop cuts them directly from peeled potatoes. Fry in butter over moderate heat so they colour without the butter browning, and add the parsley and lemon juice off the heat at the last moment.
Order of workPotatoes and quenelles can be done ahead and warmed. Cook and glaze the grenadins, then make the sauce while they rest, and sauce them just before serving, since a warm emulsion will not hold indefinitely.
ServingPlated as written it is a composed platter dish, with the potatoes ringed around the outside and the sauce over the meat. Ranhofer gives no yield.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's numbered cross-references are the fingerprint of a professional brigade kitchen: a dish like this one is a permutation, the same grenadins reappearing with celery, with sweet peppers, with a different sauce, so that a long carte could be built from a short list of prepared components. Grenadin is a French butchery term for a small larded medallion, generally traced to the diminutive of grenade. The name Valois is often said to honour the royal house, though the origin is not established; the identical béarnaise-with-meat-glaze appears in other nineteenth-century registers as Foyot, after the Paris restaurateur.