No. 2440

Tenderloin of Beef with Croustades Macedoine

Filet de Boeuf aux Croustades Macedoine

Prepare, lard, braise and glaze a fine tenderloin the same as for a la Bienvenue (No. 1445); put it aside to cool, keeping it very straight, then pare and glaze. Set it on a small rice foundation two and a half inches high and symmetrically carved (Fig. 9a). Garnish around with small croustades made of foundation paste (No. 135); fill these croustades with a small vegetable macedoine (No. 2650); season well and thicken with a ravigote mayonnaise (No. 612); sprinkle over some very finely chopped chervil, and garnish around the croustades with a row of chopped jelly. Decorate the top of the tenderloin with some Bellevue hatelets (No. 2526).

← No. 2439 Tenderloin of Beef, Grenadins Rochambeau The Cold Service No. 2441 Tenderloin of Beef with Vegetables, Mayonnai →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly instruction from a book that assumes you have already read several hundred pages of it. Nearly every element is a cross-reference, so the work is in knowing what those numbers stood for.

What the cross-references meanNo. 1445 is the larded, braised and glazed tenderloin "a la Bienvenue" that this recipe tells you to copy; No. 2650 is Ranhofer's small vegetable macedoine, a mixture of vegetables cut small; No. 612 is his ravigote mayonnaise, a mayonnaise finished with a green herb ravigote. The exact composition of each sits elsewhere in the book, not in this entry. Without those three you have no dish.
Glaze is not a sugar glazeTo "glaze" cold braised beef here means brushing it with meat glaze or half-set aspic in thin coats, each allowed to firm in the cold before the next. Work with the beef and the aspic both cold or the coating slides off in sheets.
The croustades are the tricky partFoundation paste (No. 135) is a stiff paste baked in small moulds until dry and hard, essentially edible-but-not-eaten shells for display. Small baked tartlet shells of pate brisee are the obvious modern substitute, but fill them at the last moment or the mayonnaise softens the pastry.
The rice foundationA socle: rice boiled to a paste, pressed into a block, chilled and carved. It is a plinth, not food. A wooden or acrylic riser covered in aspic-glazed slices does the same job with less trouble, and nobody today expects to see one at all.
HateletsBellevue hatelets (No. 2526) are ornamental silver skewers threaded with truffle, glazed crayfish or cockscombs and stood upright in the joint. They are Victorian table architecture with no bearing on flavour; the dish is complete without them.
Chopped jellyAspic set firm, turned out and chopped with a wet knife into glittering rubble, then spooned in a border. It needs to be genuinely firm gelatine and it must go on within minutes of serving, since it weeps as it warms.
LardingA larding needle drawing strips of chilled back fat through the meat. Tenderloin sold today is trimmed lean and takes braising badly by comparison; if you skip the larding, expect a drier result than Ranhofer got and consider barding the outside with fat instead.
Eggs and holding timeThe ravigote mayonnaise is uncooked. For a platter that stands out on a buffet, use pasteurised eggs and keep the assembled dish under refrigeration until it goes to the table.
YieldA whole trimmed tenderloin served cold in thin slices, with the vegetable croustades, feeds twelve to sixteen as a centrepiece course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is less a cookbook than the operating manual of that restaurant, complete with engravings of carved socles and skewers. This entry belongs to the cold service, the branch of nineteenth-century grande cuisine devoted to buffet display: meat cooked, cooled, coated in aspic and set on a carved plinth so that it could stand for an hour on a sideboard and still look composed. A macedoine is simply a mixture of diced vegetables, a term already old by Ranhofer's day; it is traditionally said to be named for Macedonia and its patchwork of peoples, though that explanation is folk tradition rather than established fact. Nothing here is difficult in itself; the difficulty is that the dish presumes a brigade in which one cook braises, another makes aspic, another carves rice, and another has a drawer of silver hatelets. When that organisation disappeared after the First World War, dishes like this went with it.