No. 1609

Fillets of Mutton Grenadins, Poivrade Sauce

Filets de Mouton Grenadins, Sauce Poivrade

Pare the small minion fillets; beat them into half hearts, season, range them in a tureen and cover with a cooked but cold marinade (No. 114), leaving them in for twenty-four hours, drain off the fillets, wipe well and lard with fine larding pork (No. 4, Fig. 52). Set them into a buttered sautoir, besprinkling over with more butter and push them into a brisk oven so that the larding cooks at the same time as the meat; after removing drain off the fat and moisten with a little gravy (No. 404), let this fall to a glaze over a hot fire, then lift out the fillets and dress them in two straight rows on a large dish, garnish around with triangular croutons of bread fried in butter; pour into the same sautoir a few spoonfuls of poivrade sauce (No. 523), and at the first boil pour the sauce through a fine strainer, pour part of it over the fillets and serve the remainder in a sauce-boat.

← No. 1608 Mutton Fillets a l'Alexandre Mutton No. 1610 Noisettes of Mutton, Glazed →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade, a larding needle and a cross-referenced sauce book. Stripped of those, this is a very quick dish: small tenderloin medallions, marinated, larded, roasted hot and glazed in their own pan.

What a minion fillet isThe filet mignon here is the small tenderloin strip that runs under the saddle of mutton, not a beef cut. One saddle yields two, each only a few ounces; a butcher can also cut the equivalent from a lamb saddle or you can substitute the eye of a boned loin, sliced into medallions.
"Beat them into half hearts"Flatten the trimmed fillets gently with the side of a cleaver to an even thickness and trim each into a half-heart or teardrop shape. The point is uniform thickness so they cook through at the same moment the larding browns.
The 24-hour marinadeNo. 114 is a cooked marinade of wine, vinegar, sliced onion, carrot, herbs and spice, boiled and then cooled completely before it touches the meat. Marinate in the refrigerator, not a cool larder, and pour the marinade cold: warm marinade on raw meat holds it in the temperature range where spoilage organisms multiply.
LardingFine larding pork is firm back fat cut into narrow lardons and drawn through the surface of the meat with a larding needle. Chilled fatback and a cold work surface make it manageable. If you have no needle, bard instead by tying a thin sheet of fatback over each fillet, though you lose the decorative stitching that gives the dish its look.
"A brisk oven"Ranhofer gives no temperatures; a 'brisk' oven is a hot one, which in a modern oven means roughly 425-450F. The heat is high so the exposed lardons crisp and colour in the same few minutes the meat needs. These medallions are small: check at five or six minutes and pull them at about 130F internal for rosy centres. Mutton tenderloin taken past medium turns dry and livery.
Sautoir and glazeA sautoir is a wide, straight-sided sauté pan, not a covered casserole. After roasting, tip out the fat, add a few spoonfuls of the gravy (No. 404 is one of Ranhofer's brown meat gravies) and boil hard until it coats the fillets in a syrupy film. This takes a minute or two and is the step that carries the flavour.
Poivrade sauceNo. 523 is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and the strained marinade vegetables, finished with crushed peppercorns steeped only briefly. Bring the sauce to one boil in the roasting pan to lift the fond, then strain at once; long boiling with cracked pepper turns it harsh and bitter.
CroutonsTriangles of crustless bread fried in clarified butter until dry and gold. Fry them ahead and hold them uncovered so they stay crisp; the sauce goes over the meat, not over the croutons.
YieldRanhofer gives none. Reckon two to three small fillets per person as a main course, or one per person if the dish appears mid-menu in the multi-course sequence he was writing for.

A Little History

Grenadin is a French butchery and kitchen term for a small, thick, larded cut braised or roasted to a glaze; it is most often applied to veal, and Ranhofer's use of it for mutton signals a treatment rather than a cut. The dish belongs to the long service of Delmonico's in New York, where Charles Ranhofer was chef for most of the period between 1862 and 1896, with a break in the later 1870s, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in numbered, cross-referenced form, which is why almost every element here points elsewhere in the book. Poivrade, from poivre, is one of the older sauces in the classical canon, built on the medieval and early modern habit of pairing strong pepper and vinegar with game and mutton. Mutton itself was a staple of nineteenth-century American and British tables and has largely vanished from retail sale since, displaced by younger lamb, which is milder and needs less in the way of a marinade to tame it.