No. 1812

Tenderloin of Pork a la Minute—Minced

Emince de Filet de Porc a la Minute

Have some cooked, cold, and well trimmed tenderloins of pork, cut in half heart-shapes; put them in a sautoir with a little gravy (No. 404) and heat up without boiling. Cover either of these meats with the following sauce: Fry a finely chopped shallot in butter, add to it some bread-crumbs and raw fine herbs; moisten with a little gravy, season with salt and pepper, and thicken with kneaded butter (No.579). Just when prepared to serve, pour in a little diluted mustard; dress the mince, and pour the sauce over.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A leftovers dish dressed up in Delmonico's French: cold roast pork sliced thin, warmed through in gravy, and masked with a shallot-and-mustard sauce. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the components are to hand.

Add the mustard off the heatAdd the mustard at the very last moment -- Mustard loses pungency and can turn flat if it is cooked, which is presumably why the recipe says "just when prepared to serve." The text does not say to remove the pan from the heat, but stirring the mustard in off the burner and dressing the dish immediately follows the spirit of the direction.
Never let the pork boilThe meat is already cooked. Held at a bare simmer or below in the gravy it stays succulent; at a boil, lean tenderloin seizes and goes dry and stringy within a minute or two. Two to three minutes of gentle warming is enough for thin slices.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, wider than it is deep — a modern sauté pan or a large skillet. Nothing about the dish requires the specific vessel, only a broad surface so the slices lie in one layer.
The "gravy," No. 404A cross-reference to Ranhofer's brown meat gravy rather than to pan drippings. Use a well-reduced brown stock, or thinned demi-glace; a thin canned broth will not coat the meat.
Kneaded butter, No. 579Beurre manié: soft butter worked to a paste with flour (proportions vary, commonly around equal parts by weight), whisked in bit by bit at the end. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of a roux, and is best not boiled hard afterward.
Fine herbs, rawFines herbes in this period means parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, chopped fine. "Raw" signals they go in uncooked so they keep their color and perfume; dried herbs are not a substitute here.
Bread-crumbs in a sauceThe recipe does not say which kind; soft fresh crumbs will body the sauce and give it a slight grain. Thickening with bread predates flour-based sauces in French cookery.
Half heart-shapesDecorative cutting for a plated service: the trimmed tenderloin is sliced and each slice cut to a rounded point. Plain slices, cut on the bias about a quarter inch thick, eat identically.
YieldThe original gives none. One trimmed pork tenderloin, cooked and sliced, with roughly a cup of gravy and sauce between them, serves three to four as a course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is as much a professional reference as a cookbook — hence the cross-references to numbered sauces and gravies that a home reader has to chase down. Émincé means simply "finely sliced," and it was the standard restaurant vocabulary for repurposing yesterday's roast: the meat is already cooked, so the cook's work is entirely in the sauce and the reheating. À la minute marks it as something fired to order rather than held on the stove. The sauce itself — shallot softened in butter, moistened with brown gravy, sharpened with mustard at the last moment — sits squarely in the lineage of sauce Robert and sauce charcutière, mustard-and-onion preparations of considerable antiquity in French cookery — sauce Robert is attested in French sources by the sixteenth century and earlier — and long associated with pork.