No. 1420

Noisettes of Tenderloin of Beef with Puree of Mushrooms

Noisettes de Filet de Boeuf a la Puree de Champignons

These are prepared and cooked the same as for plain noisettes (No. 1410). Glaze and lay them in round, flat croustades made with either foundation paste (No. 135) or very fine parings of puff paste, and garnished with a mushroom puree (No. 722).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe — Ranhofer assumes you have already turned to the numbered entries for the noisettes, the pastry and the purée. What follows fills in the parts a modern cook has to supply.

What a noisette isA small round medallion cut from the trimmed tenderloin. Ranhofer gives no dimensions here; something on the order of 1½ to 2 inches across and about an inch thick, one or two per person, is the usual reading. Cook them as No. 1410 directs and pull them rare to medium-rare; at this thickness they overcook in moments.
"Glaze" means meat glazeNot a sugar glaze. Ranhofer means brushing the cooked medallions with glace de viande — veal or beef stock reduced to a syrupy, near-solid consistency — for gloss and a concentrated savoury edge. A tablespoon of good reduced stock per serving is plenty.
CroustadesHere these are baked pastry cases, not fried bread. Round, flat and shallow, sized to the medallion so the meat sits on top and the purée fills around it. Blind-bake them fully and dry; a damp case collapses the moment the purée goes in.
Foundation paste vs. puff paringsNo. 135 is a stiff, unleavened flour-and-butter paste meant to hold its shape as a container. The alternative — rerolled scraps of puff pastry — is the classic thrift move, since twice-rolled puff will not rise evenly and is best used where lift does not matter.
Mushroom puréeNo. 722 is a cooked purée, not a raw blitz: mushrooms sweated in butter until they release and reabsorb their liquid, then chopped or sieved fine and bound — check No. 722 for the binding Ranhofer actually specifies, most likely a little béchamel or reduced cream. It should mound on a spoon. Loose purée will flood the croustade.
Order of workCases and purée first, meat last. The medallions cook in three or four minutes total and should go straight from pan to glaze to plate; everything else can wait warm.
YieldRanhofer gives none for this entry. Figure two noisettes and two croustades per person as a first course, three as a main.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked during some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and entries like this one show how the book actually works: a vast cross-referenced system in which a handful of base preparations — pastes, purées, garnishes, cuts — recombine into hundreds of named dishes. The noisette itself belongs to the late nineteenth-century grande cuisine habit of reducing large roasting cuts to small, uniform, quickly cooked portions that could be plated to order in a restaurant rather than carved at table, and the croustade solved the attendant problem of getting a sauce or purée to the diner without a pool on the plate. The tenderloin's rise to prestige in American dining is generally traced to exactly this period and this kind of establishment, where the most tender and least flavourful part of the animal was dressed up with glaze, pastry and mushrooms to supply what the meat itself lacked.