No. 1406

Minions of Tenderloin of Beef a la Stanley

Mignons de Filet de Boeuf a la Stanley

After preparing and cooking the minions as described in plain minions (No. 1399), glaze them with a brush, and lay them on a dish. Remove the peel from several bananas, cut them lengthwise in two, and cut each half across; roll the pieces in flour, and plunge them to fry in very hot oil. Fry in butter without browning, one small onion weighing an ounce and chopped up very fine; moisten this with one gill of cream, reduce and strain through a sieve, then thicken it with egg-yolks stirred up in cream. Add some freshly grated horseradish, until the preparation thickens well, then season with salt. Warm this without boiling, garnish the minions with it, having it an inch deep and bomb-shaped. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the top, and set on each one, a quarter of a fried banana.

← No. 1405 Minions of Tenderloin of Beef a la Salvini Beef No. 1407 Minions of Tenderloin of Beef a la Vernon →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's plate that hangs on two things: medallions cooked rare and rested, and an onion-cream sauce bound with yolks that must never reach a simmer. Everything else is assembly.

The sauce is the hingeOnce the yolks beaten with cream go in, hold the pan between 160 and 180F and stir constantly; at a boil it will scramble and break. Ranhofer's "warm this without boiling" is the whole instruction.
GillOne gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). Reduced, it yields only a few spoonfuls of base, so the yolk-and-cream liaison is doing most of the volume work.
Mignons and No. 1399Mignons are medallions cut from the tenderloin, trimmed round. The cross-referenced "plain minions" recipe is not reproduced here; cook them as you would any tenderloin medallion, keeping them rare to medium-rare, then rest them.
Glazing with a brushThe glaze is meat glaze: veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup that sets tacky when cool. A spoonful of demi-glace or a commercial glace de viande, brushed on warm meat, does the same job of putting a shine on the medallions.
Freshly grated horseradishUse the root, grated at the last minute; prepared horseradish packed in vinegar brings acidity and a brine taste the recipe does not call for. Add it off direct heat, since heat dulls the volatile bite.
BananasPlantains behave better than dessert bananas here, which soften to mush in hot oil. Whichever you use, flour them dry and fry at 350–375F only until they take color at the edges, a minute or two.
"An inch deep and bomb-shaped"The sauce is meant to sit in a domed mound on each medallion, not to pool on the plate. That only works if it is thick enough to hold a shape, so reduce the onion cream well before the yolks go in.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One small onion and one gill of cream make a modest amount of sauce, so plan on scaling it to the number of medallions rather than scaling the garnish; a quarter banana per portion is plenty.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and its long runs of numbered variations on a single cut — mignons à la Salvini, à la Stanley, à la Vernon in sequence — show how a nineteenth-century restaurant built a menu: one well-understood preparation, endlessly regarnished and renamed for a patron, a performer or a celebrity of the moment. Garnishes called à la Stanley are generally traced to Henry Morton Stanley, whose African expeditions made him a household name in the 1870s and 1880s, and the family of dishes bearing his name tends to combine cream, onion, and something tropical — banana here, curry in Escoffier's later version — as culinary shorthand for the equator. The fried banana is worth noting in its own right: by the 1890s steamship lines had made bananas a reliably available fruit in New York, novel enough to signal luxury and exotic enough to carry the reference.