No. 1451

Tenderloin of Beef a la Godard—Whole

Filet de Boeuf a la Godard--Entier

After cooking a tenderloin of beef the same as for a la Bienvenue (No. 1445) pare and glaze it. Make a foundation of rice, two inches high, and from ten to twelve inches long and five inches wide, egg the surface, flute it symmetrically and color it in a hot oven. Lay this on the middle of a hot dish, set the tenderloin on top and garnish around with twelve truffles cooked in Madeira wine, twelve fine mushroom heads grooved and turned round (No. 118), and twelve cock's-combs. Moisten with a little half-glaze (No. 400). Set around twelve oval quenelles decorated with red beef tongue, decorate the top with five skewers made of truffles and double cocks'-combs, and serve with a half-glaze (No. 413) separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a service formula rather than a standalone recipe: the cooking is handled elsewhere in the book and what you see here is the dressing of a whole tenderloin on a rice pedestal with the classic Godard garnish. Read the cross-references first, because nothing here tells you how the beef is actually cooked.

Chase the cross-referencesNo. 1445 supplies the cooking method for the whole tenderloin, No. 118 the turned mushrooms, and Nos. 400 and 413 the half-glazes. Without them the page is only a plating diagram. Note that two different half-glazes are called for: one to moisten the garnish and a separate one sent to table. The recipe does not say how the two differ.
Half-glaze means demi-glaceIn Ranhofer's vocabulary this is reduced brown sauce or espagnole slackened with stock and reduced again. Modern practice would use a reduced veal stock or a good demi-glace; a jar of glace de viande diluted with stock gets you close.
Glazing the meatTo "glaze" the pared tenderloin is to brush it with meat glaze — stock reduced to syrup — and set it in the oven or under a salamander for a minute so it takes on gloss. It is a finish, not a further cooking step, and should be done at the last moment.
The rice socleThe rice foundation is a socle: rice cooked to a stiff, sticky paste, moulded to the stated 10-12 by 5 by 2 inches, egged, fluted symmetrically with a knife and coloured in a hot oven. The book gives no temperature, so judge it by the surface taking gold colour without drying through. It is structural and decorative, and was generally not eaten.
Cocks' combsThese will not be found at a supermarket. They were blanched, peeled of their skin and simmered in acidulated white stock until translucent. Some Asian and specialist poultry butchers still sell them; otherwise omit them, or substitute additional turned mushrooms and truffle slices. Drop them and the skewers lose half their material, since the recipe threads them with truffles and double cocks' combs together.
QuenellesTwelve oval quenelles means veal or chicken forcemeat piped or moulded into ovals and poached gently in salted water or light stock at a bare tremble — boiling breaks them. The "decoration" is small cut shapes of cooked red beef tongue pressed onto the surface before poaching.
SkewersThe five skewers are hâtelets: ornamental silver or steel skewers threaded with garnish and stood upright in the meat for presentation. Plain metal skewers work; wooden ones look wrong and scorch under a salamander.
Truffles in MadeiraTwelve whole truffles is a nineteenth-century restaurant quantity, not a domestic one. A few sliced truffles warmed in Madeira, or good preserved truffle peelings, will carry the flavour at a fraction of the cost.
YieldTwelve of each garnish element implies roughly twelve portions from a whole trimmed tenderloin, which suits a pedestal ten to twelve inches long. The recipe itself gives no instruction for carving or serving out.

A Little History

Garniture a la Godard belongs to the fixed vocabulary of French grande cuisine as it was codified in the nineteenth century: a named garnish that a cook could execute from the name alone, here quenelles, truffles, turned mushrooms, cocks' combs and a Madeira-scented brown sauce. The attribution to a person named Godard is traditional and poorly documented; what is certain is that Careme and his successors treated such garnishes as standard entries, and Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, reproduced dozens of them in The Epicurean (1894) so that an American kitchen could turn out the same dishes as a Parisian one. The rice socle and the ornamental skewers are characteristic of the period: this is food built to be looked at, in an age when a garnished centrepiece could be shown and then carved away from the table. Cocks' combs were prized for their gelatinous texture and pale shape, and their near-absence from ordinary butchery today, together with the cost of twelve whole truffles, is why the dish is hard to assemble exactly as written.