No. 1412

Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef a la Bonnefoy

Noisettes de Filet de Boeuf a la Bonnefoy

Arrange, prepare and cook the noisettes as explained for plain (No. 1410). Dish them and pour over a sauce prepared as follows: Put some half-glaze sauce (No. 413) into a small saucepan, stir it well with a whip and mixing in with it the same quantity of butter; season with mignonette, lemon juice and chopped parsley. Cut some pieces of beef marrow, a quarter of an inch thick, throw them into boiling water, and drain them. Have double the quantity of thin slices of mushrooms; lay the mushroons and marrow intercalated in some tarlet molds, dressing them dome-shape fill up with sauce; put them on ice. When cold unmould them by dipping the molds in hot water; dip them in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs and fry to a good color. Dress them crowned-shaped around the noisettes, allowing two pieces of fritter for each noisette.

← No. 1411 Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef a la Berthie Beef No. 1413 Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef a la Fleuret →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stock pots already going, so most of the work here is upstream of the page. The dish is two components: small tenderloin steaks cooked plainly, and croquette-like fritters of marrow and mushroom bound in cold demi-glace.

The hinge: the sauce must set hardThe fritters only work if the half-glaze is gelatinous enough to gel firm in the mold, because that chilled block is the only thing holding the marrow and mushrooms together through breading and frying. A reduced veal stock rich in natural gelatin is essential; a thin or cornstarch-thickened sauce will slump when unmolded and burst in the fat. Chill several hours, not minutes, and bread them straight from the cold.
Half-glazeNo. 413 is demi-glace: espagnole reduced with more brown stock until it coats. The recipe describes only one sauce, the buttered and seasoned one, and does not say whether the sauce used to fill the molds is that same mounted sauce or plain half-glaze; the text leaves it open.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked pepper, not ground; classically white, though black is often used. Crush peppercorns under a pan bottom so the pieces stay visible in the sauce.
Beef marrowAsk a butcher for cut marrow bones, or buy canoe-cut femur; soak the bones in cold water to loosen the marrow, then push it out whole and slice a quarter inch thick. Blanch briefly in boiling water only until the slices firm and turn opaque, seconds rather than minutes, then drain on a cloth. Overcooked marrow simply melts away.
Tartlet moldsSmall metal tartlet tins, plain or fluted, a couple of inches across. "Intercalated" means alternating the marrow and mushroom slices in layers, domed up in the center, then filling the gaps with sauce so the whole thing sets as one piece.
FryingDeep fat at 350-375F, just long enough to color the crumbs, perhaps a minute. The interior is meant to be barely warm and the sauce only beginning to loosen; longer and the filling liquefies and escapes.
Butter in the sauceEqual weights of demi-glace and butter, whipped in off direct heat and kept below a simmer. Once it boils the emulsion breaks and the sauce goes greasy. Add the lemon juice and parsley last.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in one enormous volume, complete with the cross-references to numbered mother sauces that make any single entry read like a fragment. A noisette is a small round cut from the tenderloin, literally a "hazelnut," and Ranhofer devotes a long run of consecutive numbers to noisettes under different garnishes, of which this is one. The name Bonnefoy in French classical cookery is usually attached to a white-wine sauce with shallots -- a bordelaise made with white instead of red, and generally finished with tarragon rather than marrow. Ranhofer's version here is built on half-glaze and turns the marrow into fried garnishes crowned around the meat, in keeping with the taste of the 1880s and 1890s, when a dish was expected to be constructed and presented as much as cooked. The use of beef marrow itself belongs to an era when the whole animal came into the kitchen and a byproduct like marrow was an everyday luxury rather than a specialty order.