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Filet Mignons, Cafe Riche
Cut two pounds well-trimmed filet of beef into six even pieces, neatly round, lightly flatten and season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one tablespoon melted butter, arrange the filets in a frying pan, one beside another, and fry for three minutes on each side. Prepare six round pieces toast, place on a dish and dress the filets on them. Place six stuffed green peppers around the filets, pour a Bearnaise sauce and arrange a very thin slice of truffle over and serve.
A restaurant plate reduced to five sentences, on the assumption that the cook already knows how to make Béarnaise and how to stuff a pepper. The only real technique here is the sear, and the timing given is tight.
- Portion sizeTwo pounds of trimmed tenderloin cut in six gives roughly 5 oz per portion, about 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick after the light flattening. Anything much thicker will not cook through in the three minutes a side specified.
- Three minutes a sideOn a properly hot pan that produces a rare to medium-rare centre, which is what the dish intends. Filet has almost no fat and goes dry and mealy past 135F internal, so use a thermometer rather than the clock if your pieces are thicker than the recipe assumes.
- One tablespoon of butterScant for six filets in one pan, and butter alone will blacken at searing heat. Clarified butter, or butter with a neutral oil, holds up better; alternatively sear in oil and add whole butter at the end to baste.
- Crowding the pan"One beside another" is the instruction that decides the dish. Six filets in a domestic 10-inch skillet will steam rather than brown, so work in two batches or use two pans.
- The toastThe recipe says only "six round pieces toast," cut to the diameter of the filets. In this style of service they are usually croutes fried in butter or clarified butter rather than dry sliced bread; either way they want to be crisp and slightly thicker than sandwich toast so they absorb the juices without going to pulp.
- BéarnaiseBearnaise -- An egg-yolk emulsion of tarragon-and-shallot reduction, vinegar and butter, and it will break if it gets too hot or is left to chill. Make it last, keep it in a warm bowl off direct heat, and sauce at the table rather than in advance.
- TruffleFresh black truffle is a seasonal luxury; jarred or canned preserved truffle, sliced paper-thin, is the practical stand-in. Shave it over the hot meat so the aroma lifts.
- Stuffed peppersThe recipe says only "six stuffed green peppers" and gives no size or filling, assuming the cook knows the preparation. Small sweet peppers, filled with a savoury forcemeat or duxelles and warmed through, keep the scale of the plate right; large baked halves, which the phrase now suggests, would overwhelm it.
- Yield and timingSix servings, as a main course with the peppers as the only garnish. Have the sauce, peppers, truffle and toast all finished before the beef goes in the pan; the searing is the last six minutes of work.
Café Riche stood on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris and was one of the grand boulevard restaurants of the Second Empire and after, a fixture of the same world as the Café Anglais and the Maison Dorée; it closed in the years around the First World War. Naming a garnished filet for a restaurant, a city or a patron was standard practice in the codified French service of the period — the meat is always the same, and the name tells you what is around it, here Béarnaise, truffle and a stuffed pepper. Alexander Filippini, who compiled The International Cook Book (1906), had spent his career at Delmonico's in New York, where this Franco-American repertoire was the house language, and his entries read as aide-mémoire for cooks who already knew the mother sauces rather than as instruction for beginners.