Home › The World's Kitchen › Filet of Beef Larded, Moderne
Filet of Beef Larded, Moderne
Neatly trim a two-and-a-half-pound piece filet of beef and lard the surface with a few small thin strips of larding pork. Place in a roasting pan one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, any little lard parings on hand and place the filet on top. Spread two tablespoons melted lard on top of the filet, pour a half gill cold water into the pan and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Set in the oven to roast for thirty-five minutes, turning over once in a while and basting it with its own gravy. Remove, dress on a hot dish, skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, add one gill demi-glace to the pan, let boil for five minutes and strain the gravy over the filet. Dress a cauliflower saute on one side of the dish, three stuffed tomatoes cut in halves on the other side, sprinkle a half teaspoon chopped parsley over all and serve.
A straightforward roast filet with a pan sauce, written for a kitchen where larding needles and a stockpot of demi-glace were standard equipment. Two things are missing from the original: an oven temperature and any way to judge doneness beyond the clock.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. For a whole trimmed filet a hot oven, roughly 425-450F, suits the thirty-five-minute timing; a slower oven is unlikely to brown the surface fat in that time.
- Judge by temperature, not timeThirty-five minutes suits a thick 2.5 lb centre-cut at high heat, but tail-end pieces and thinner trimmings will overshoot badly. Pull at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare, then rest 10 minutes before carving.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so the half gill of water in the pan is 1/4 cup and the gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup.
- Larding porkLarding pork is unsmoked fatback cut into thin lardons and threaded through the meat with a larding needle, which keeps a very lean cut moist. Without the needle, tie a thin sheet of fatback or a few rashers of unsmoked streaky bacon over the top (barding) and remove it for the last few minutes so the surface browns.
- Lard and parings"Lard" here is rendered pork fat, and "little lard parings" are the scraps left from trimming it, thrown in to enrich the pan drippings. Clarified butter or beef fat does the same job.
- Demi-glaceThe book expects a reduced brown veal or beef sauce already on hand. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced beef stock works; with only 1/2 cup boiling for five minutes there is no time to build body, so it must already be concentrated.
- Deglaze properlyAfter skimming, scrape the caramelised carrot, onion and meat juices off the pan bottom while the demi-glace boils, then strain. That fond is the whole sauce.
- YieldA 2.5 lb filet with two vegetable garnishes serves four to six as the centre of a meal.
This is the kind of composed roast that the grand-hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned out in quantity: a lean prime cut, larded to compensate for its lack of fat, sauced with a spoonful of the house demi-glace, and set on the platter between two contrasting garnishes. The recipe's real assumption is a professional larder: demi-glace kept ready in the sauce station, pork fat and its trimmings always at hand, and a cook who could lard a filet without thinking about it. Filet was among the most expensive cuts of beef in this period precisely because it is small, tender and lean, and larding it was the standard remedy for a cut with almost no internal fat to baste itself.