No. 1428

Tenderloin Steak with Olives

Filet de Boeuf aux Olives

Have the tenderloin prepared and cooked as described in plain (No. 1423). Detach the glaze from the pan with a little Madeira wine and clear gravy (No. 404) reduced. When reduced sufficiently to cover a spoon, strain and replace it on the fire in a low saucepan; add ten stoned olives for each tenderloin having previously thrown them into boiling water to blanch them and let them boil up once. Dress the meat, cover with the sauce and arrange the olives around.

← No. 1427 Tenderloin Steak with Mushrooms Beef No. 1429 Tenderloin Steak with Truffles →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is a deglazed pan sauce, and everything hinges on the reduction being right before the olives go anywhere near it. Two cross-references (Nos. 1423 and 404) carry most of the cooking; what follows is the sauce.

"Tenderloin" means the whole filetDespite the English title, the French heading is Filet de Boeuf and the recipe specifies ten olives "for each tenderloin," so this is a garnish for a whole filet on the platter, not for one portion. Scale the olives down accordingly if you are working with individual steaks.
Clear gravy (No. 404)Ranhofer's clear gravy is a strong, clarified brown gravy rather than a garnished sauce. Reduced unsalted veal or beef stock is the nearest modern equivalent; a good demi-glace works but should be thinned, since it is already concentrated and will oversalt once the olives arrive.
"Cover a spoon"This is the nappe stage: the sauce coats the back of a spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clean line. The recipe gives no quantities; reduce until it reaches that consistency, and note that overshooting leaves it tacky as it cools.
MadeiraUse a dry to medium Sercial or Verdelho, not a sweet Malmsey and not a supermarket "cooking Madeira," which is salted. Add it to the hot pan off the heat, then return to reduce so the alcohol cooks off.
Blanching the olivesStoned means pitted. The boiling-water dip pulls out brine and bitterness so the sauce is not overwhelmed; thirty seconds to a minute is enough with modern brined olives. Green olives of the picholine or Spanish manzanilla type suit the dish.
"Let them boil up once"Take this literally. One brief boil warms the olives through; a sustained simmer collapses them and pushes salt into a sauce that is already concentrated. Season the sauce only after the olives have gone in.
Doneness and restingThe original assumes the cook knows the point. Pull a whole tenderloin at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare and rest it ten to fifteen minutes before carving; a well-done filet has nothing left to give this sauce.
StrainingStrain the reduction before the olives go in, as written. The pan solids left after deglazing will make the finished sauce cloudy and gritty, which defeats the point of a clear gravy base.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his service manual, which is why so many entries are a single paragraph pointing back to a base preparation and a base sauce. This dish sits in a run of tenderloin variations - mushrooms at No. 1427, olives here, truffles at No. 1429 - varying largely in the garnish, close to the modular structure a large brigade needs to fire dozens of covers from one roasted filet. Olives with beef and Madeira belongs to the French repertoire Ranhofer trained in, where a blanched green olive is often said to have been valued for cutting the richness of a reduced brown sauce; the same logic survives in dishes like canard aux olives.