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Filet Mignon, Balthazard
Cut out from a filet of two pounds six small, even pieces; neatly flatten them. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Heat one-half ounce melted butter in a frying pan, add the filets, one beside another, and cook for three minutes on each side. Place on a dish and keep hot.
Boil in a small saucepan two gills demi-glace, add one-half teaspoon chopped chives and a quarter of a teaspoon chopped parsley and let reduce to one-half on the fire. Plunge one-half pint French flageolets into a pint boiling water for five minutes. Drain well, replace them in the saucepan. Season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper, adding half ounce good butter; mix well with a fork and heat for two minutes; then keep warm. Prepare the same quantity glazed onions. Place the filets on six round, toasted bread croutons. Garnish one side of the dish with the flageolets, the other side with the glazed onions, pour the sauce over the filets and serve very hot.
N. B. Sauce, flageolets and glazed onions should be prepared before the filets.
A straightforward French-service dish from the Delmonico's tradition: pan-seared tenderloin on croutons with two garnishes and a reduced brown sauce. The note at the end is the real instruction — everything but the beef is finished first, because the filets wait for nothing.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making two gills of demi-glace one cup, reduced to half a cup.
- Portion sizeThe six pieces are cut out of a two-pound filet, so they are smaller than a straight division of the weight would suggest; the recipe calls them 'small' and has them flattened. Serves six as written; fewer at modern portion sizes.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing assumes a hot pan and, on pieces this small and flattened, will not take them far past rare; the recipe states no thickness. Half an ounce of butter for six steaks is about a tablespoon — use enough fat to coat the pan, and sear in two batches rather than crowding, or the meat steams.
- Demi-glaceA veal-stock brown sauce reduced with espagnole. Commercial demi-glace concentrate works; if you substitute stock, reduce considerably further or the sauce will not coat. Add the chives and parsley at the end of the reduction, not the start, so they keep their colour.
- FlageoletsPale green French shell beans, sold dried or in jars. Five minutes in boiling water only makes sense for already-cooked beans, so the original assumes canned or previously simmered ones. Dried flageolets need soaking and an hour or more of gentle cooking before this step.
- Glazed onions"The same quantity" means half a pint of small peeled pearl or button onions, cooked with butter, a little sugar and water until the liquid reduces to a glossy coating. Brown-glazed rather than white suits the demi-glace better.
- CroutonsRounds of bread cut to match the filets and fried in butter or toasted until firm. They exist to absorb sauce without going to pulp, so they need to be dry and crisp, not soft toast.
- Order of workBeans, onions and sauce all hold well over low heat. Sear the beef last, plate immediately, and pour the sauce over at the table side of the kitchen — a filet held hot for even five minutes keeps cooking.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe carries the marks of that house: a named garnish, a classical demi-glace, and a plate composed in the French manner with one vegetable on either side of the meat. Nineteenth-century restaurant cooking generated hundreds of such personal dedications — a dish would be assembled for a regular customer, a visiting dignitary or a colleague and thereafter carry the name, and by the time it reached print the person behind it was often forgotten. Flageolets themselves are a comparatively young bean, generally traced to nineteenth-century France, where they were picked young and dried while still green; they became the standard accompaniment to roast and grilled meats in French bourgeois cooking and appear here doing exactly that job. The instruction to prepare everything before the filets is the practical heart of the entry: the garnishes were held on the stove and the protein cooked to order.