No. 1410

Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef, Plain

Noisettes de Filet de Boeuf Nature

Trim a tenderloin of beef, cut it in slices and beat lightly to flatten to three-eighths of an inch in thickness, then trim them again round-shaped; each one should weigh three ounces. Salt them on both sides; put half oil and half butter in a saucepan and set it on a hot fire, place therein the meat, and let cook quickly. It will take about five minutes to have them rare, seven minutes to cook them properly, and eight minutes if desired well done. When finished, remove, lay them on a plate, glaze and serve on a dish with a little clear gravy (No. 404) poured around.

← No. 1409 Minions of Tenderloin of Beef with Chestnuts Beef No. 1411 Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef a la Berthie →

For the Modern Kitchen

A plain sauté of small tenderloin rounds, from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire. The only real adjustment a modern cook needs to make is to the clock.

The timings are longAt three-eighths of an inch, a 3 oz medallion in a hot pan will be rare well inside Ranhofer's five minutes; treat his figures as an outer limit and go by feel. Some of the difference may simply be the equipment: a solid-fuel range and a heavy pan do not behave like gas or induction.
"Noisette"French for hazelnut, used in butchery for a small round cut. Here it simply means the tenderloin is sliced and trimmed into neat discs; nothing hazelnut is involved.
Cutting the medallionsThree ounces at three-eighths of an inch comes out as a disc nearer four inches across, which is why the recipe has you beat the slice out. Cut from the centre of the tenderloin and the slices are already close to round; flatten with the side of a cleaver or the flat of a heavy pan, not a mallet, or the fibres tear.
"Saucepan" means a sauté pan"Saucepan" here is doing the work of a sauté pan; Ranhofer uses the term loosely, and quick frying like this wants a shallow pan rather than a deep one. Use your widest heavy skillet and cook in batches — crowding is the enemy of browning, and browning is the entire point of a dish with no sauce to hide behind.
Half oil, half butterThe oil raises the smoke point so the butter can brown the meat without blackening. Clarified butter alone works equally well.
"Glaze" is a verb hereIt means brushing the cooked medallions with meat glaze — for gloss and a concentrated savoury coat. A spoonful of reduced beef stock does the job.
The clear gravyNo. 404 is Ranhofer's clarified brown stock, essentially a light unthickened jus. Poured around rather than over, so the glazed surface stays shiny.
Yield and restingCount two medallions per person as a course, three as a main. Rest them two or three minutes while you deglaze the pan; longer and they go cold, since there is very little mass to hold heat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working manual, numbered and cross-referenced so a cook could assemble a dish from its components. This entry is the plain version, sitting among the neighbouring numbered tenderloin dishes. Its presence says a good deal about how a nineteenth-century luxury kitchen operated, with the tenderloin's trimmed centre cut into uniform portions and finished to order in minutes while the stocks and glazes that dressed it had been simmering since morning.