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Filet of Beef Larded, Madeira Sauce
Prepare a larded filet of beef. Dress it on a hot dish, decorate with a little watercress and serve with a hot Madeira sauce in a saucebowl separately.
This is a skeleton entry of the kind common in turn-of-the-century professional cookbooks: the author assumes you already know how to lard and roast a filet and how to build a Madeira sauce, and tells you only how to send it out. Here is what the shorthand leaves out.
- What "filet" means hereThe whole trimmed beef tenderloin, not a cut steak — roughly 4 to 5 lb once the chain and silverskin are off, serving eight to ten. A center-cut piece of 2 to 3 lb behaves the same way but cooks faster.
- Larding, and whyLarding means threading strips of cold pork back fat (lardons) through the meat with a larding needle. Tenderloin has almost no internal fat, and a 1900 kitchen roasting it hard needed the insurance. Barding — tying a sheet of fat or caul over the outside — gives much of the same protection with far less work, and is the more common approach in modern kitchens.
- Fat you can actually buyFresh pork back fat or fatback from a butcher is the correct material. Cured bacon or pancetta will read as smoke and salt rather than as beef, which is not the effect intended.
- Temperature, since the original gives noneSear the tied filet hard, then roast at 425F, or start at 425F for 15 minutes and drop to 350F. Pull it at 120–125F internal for rare, 130F for medium rare; the tapered ends will always be more done than the center.
- Rest before dressingFifteen minutes under loose foil before it goes to the hot dish. Carving straight from the oven costs you the juices that the larding was meant to preserve.
- The Madeira sauceIn this book's idiom that is a brown sauce — demi-glace or a well-reduced veal stock — finished with Madeira off the heat, plus the deglazed roasting pan. Add the wine at the end and do not boil it long, or the aroma that gives the sauce its name cooks off. Sercial or Verdelho is drier and truer than a sweet Malmsey.
- Serving separatelyServing the sauce in a boat rather than over the meat keeps the crust on the filet and the watercress from wilting. The cress is a peppery garnish and was often eaten rather than merely looked at — dress it with a little lemon or vinegar at the last moment.
Larding was one of the defining skills of the professional kitchen from the eighteenth century into the twentieth, and a larded filet with a fortified-wine sauce was standard grand-service fare in hotel and restaurant dining rooms of the period — the sort of dish a chef could quote in a single line because every cook in the brigade already knew it. Madeira earned its place in that repertoire partly through the accident of its making: the wine was found to improve rather than spoil on long sea voyages through hot holds, and the heating and oxidation that produce its character were later adopted deliberately, which made it a reliable pantry item for cooks long before refrigeration. Its use in brown sauces, alongside sherry and port, is generally traced to French classical practice, and "sauce Madère" appears as a set piece in the codified sauce lists of the era. The brevity of this entry is itself the historical detail worth noticing: books aimed at hotel kitchens catalogued presentations, while books aimed at housewives had to explain the roast.