No. 1462

Tenderloin of Beef, Hunter's Style—Whole

Filet de Boeuf au Chasseur--Entier

This tenderloin is to be cooked and prepared exactly the same as for a la Bayonnaise (No. 1443); pare it, glaze, and dress it on a rice or short paste (No. 135) foundation, garnishing around and on each side with game quenelles (No. 91), molded in a tablespoon (Fig. 80), and laying them one beside the other on a buttered tin sheet; pour into this sheet some boiling salted water, and keep the water continually boiling while poaching the quenelles until they are thoroughly done. Raise the tenderloins and sirloin from four young rabbits or any other kind of game, paring them to the same shape as the rabbit tenderloin; remove all the nerves with the tip of a knife, then lay them on a dish, and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, thyme, bay leaf, branches of parsley, minced carrots and onions, lemon juice, and two tablespoonfuls of oil; let them marinate in this for one hour, being careful to turn them over several times, then take them from the dish without the vegetables and after dipping them into a frying batter (No. 137); fry them a fine color and garnish with these. Have a half-glaze sauce (No. 413), add to it some game carcasses and Madeira wine, when the same is ready strain either through a sieve or tammy, and mix in with the sauce some eighth of an inch square pieces of cooked ham. Pour a third of this around the tenderloin, and send the rest to the table in a separate sauce-boat.

← No. 1461 Tenderloin of Beef Braised with Roots—Whole Beef No. 1463 Tenderloin of Beef, Indian Style—Whole →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a larder of stocks already made, and this entry is mostly a set of cross-references. Assembled in a modern kitchen it is a roast whole tenderloin with a game garnish and a Madeira demi-glace.

The recipe is not self-containedFive of the numbered references do the real work: the tenderloin itself is cooked as No. 1443, the socle as No. 135, the quenelle forcemeat as No. 91, the batter as No. 137 and the sauce as No. 413. Without those pages you have an outline, not a method.
The hinge: the quenellesRanhofer says to keep the water "continually boiling" while poaching. Do not. A rolling boil tears spooned game quenelles apart and toughens them; hold the water at 170-180F so the surface barely shivers, and count on 8-12 minutes for tablespoon-sized ovals.
Whole tenderloin, and when it is doneA trimmed beef tenderloin runs 4-6 lb and serves ten to twelve with this garnish. Pull it at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare and rest it 15 minutes; the glaze is brushed on after resting, not before.
Glaze"Glaze" here is glace de viande, brown stock reduced to a syrup, brushed on for shine. Reduced commercial demi-glace or a heavily reduced beef stock stands in.
Half-glaze and tammyHalf-glaze is demi-glace. A tammy is a fine worsted cloth used to force sauce through; a chinois lined with muslin does the same job. The ham is cut in an eighth-inch brunoise and added after straining so it stays visible.
The foundationThe rice or short-paste socle is a decorative plinth to raise the meat on a platter, and was generally not eaten. Modern service can skip it and set the tenderloin directly on a warmed platter without losing anything but height.
Game and "nerves"Four young rabbits yield very little loin; one rabbit's loins and a pair of venison or duck fillets will fill the same role. "Nerves" means silverskin, which must come off with a thin blade or the fillets curl in the fryer.
The marinadeOne hour in oil, lemon, aromatics and vegetables is enough for small fillets. Wipe them dry before battering or the batter slides off; fry at 350-360F until golden, two to three minutes for pieces this size.
Sauce quantityRanhofer sends two-thirds of the sauce to the table separately. He gives no quantity; something in the region of a quart is a reasonable working figure for a tenderloin of this size, generous but in keeping with the way the dish is carved and served at table.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style exactly: a plain cut of beef raised on a socle and ringed with several separate preparations, each one a cross-reference to another numbered recipe. Au chasseur, hunter's style, here means what the name literally suggests, a garnish of game rather than the mushroom-shallot-and-tomato sauce chasseur, which was already current in French kitchens at the time and is the usual reading of the term today. The rabbit fillets, the game quenelles and the carcasses simmered into the Madeira sauce all point back to a period when wild rabbit, venison and small game were ordinary market goods in American cities and a restaurant kitchen broke them down itself. The construction, one central roast surrounded by two or three contrasting garnitures with the bulk of the sauce sent separately, is standard grande cuisine service of the 1880s and 1890s and assumes a dining room where a platter was presented whole before being carved.