No. 2437

Tenderloin of Beef a la Noailles

Filet de Boeuf a la Noailles

This tenderloin must be prepared exactly the same as for a la Bayonnaise (No. 1443); when cold trim it nicely and glaze it with meat glaze (No. 402), using a brush for the purpose. Cover it with jelly and set it on a symmetrically carved rice foundation, garnishing around with mushrooms, truffles, scallops of foies-gras and chicken mousselines made in tartlet molds. The mushrooms are to be cooked and emptied with a vegetable scoop, then filled with a foies-gras, pressed through a tammy and glazed in a white chaudfroid (No. 596). The chicken mousselines should be covered with green chaudfroid (No. 595), and scallops of foies-gras to be covered with a brown chaudfroid (No. 594), the truffles glazed. Arrange this garnishing around the tenderloin with chopped jelly and croutons of jelly, but do not decorate it with hatelets.

← No. 2436 Tenderloin of Beef a la Lucullus The Cold Service No. 2438 Tenderloin of Beef a la Violetta →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooking one: Ranhofer assumes you already have the braised tenderloin, the glaze, the aspic and three chaudfroid sauces in hand from elsewhere in The Epicurean. What follows is what a modern cook needs to reconstruct the missing pieces.

The hinge: everything must be cold and setChaudfroid and aspic only behave if the beef and the garnishes are thoroughly chilled and the sauce is at the point of setting — thick enough to coat the back of a spoon but still pourable. Coat too warm and it slides off; too cool and it goes lumpy. Work in a cool room, in thin successive coats, chilling between each.
What the cross-references areNo. 1443 (à la Bayonnaise) is where Ranhofer sends you for the cooking method; the tenderloin is to be finished and served cold. No. 402 is meat glaze — brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm; a strongly reduced homemade beef stock stands in. Nos. 594, 595 and 596 are brown, green and white chaudfroid: a velouté or espagnole base fortified with gelatin, the green usually tinted with spinach or herb purée.
"Jelly"Throughout the cold service this means clarified aspic — strong stock cleared with egg white and set with gelatin. Firm enough to cut into cubes and croutons, which is why the chopped and shaped jelly can be piled around the base.
The rice foundation is not foodA socle of rice was cooked to a stiff paste, moulded, dried and carved as a plinth to raise the joint on the platter. It was decorative and structural, never eaten. A shallow inverted dish or a plated stand does the same job now.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth; "pressed through a tammy" means forced through to a smooth purée. A food processor followed by a fine-mesh sieve gives the same texture in less time.
HateletsHâtelets are ornamental silver skewers, often finished with a carved truffle or a crayfish, driven into a cold piece for display. Ranhofer simply forbids them here and does not say why; the likeliest reading is that it distinguishes this dressing from its neighbours.
Foie gras and trufflesFoie gras and truffles recur throughout the cold service and both appear here. Mousse-quality foie gras is expensive; a good chicken liver parfait is the honest substitute, and canned or jarred truffle can replace fresh for the glazed pieces since they are lacquered in aspic anyway.
Holding and servingA whole trimmed tenderloin serves 8 to 12 as a cold buffet centrepiece. Assemble it the day it is served and keep it refrigerated until the last possible moment; aspic and chaudfroid soften and weep at room temperature, and the garnishes contain cooked liver and poultry that should not sit out.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for the better part of three decades, with a break in the late 1870s, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system written down — which is why a dish like this consists almost entirely of pointers to other numbered recipes. The cold service section catalogues the great pièces montées of the nineteenth-century buffet, where a single cut of beef could be dressed a dozen ways and told apart only by its garnish and the colour of its sauce; the differences between à la Lucullus, à la Noailles and à la Violetta are differences of ornament, not of cooking. The name points to the Noailles, a French ducal family, in the same spirit that gave us Soubise and Béchamel — a compliment paid in the dining room rather than a record of who invented anything. What the recipe really documents is a brigade system: mushrooms hollowed with a vegetable scoop, tartlet moulds of chicken mousseline, three separate chaudfroids held at coating temperature at once, all of it plausible only in a kitchen with many hands and a cold larder.