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Filet of Beef Larded, Parisienne
Remove the outer muscular skin and sinews and trim nicely two and a half pounds tenderloin of beef. Carefully lard it with very thin strips of larding pork, using a larding needle. Place the skin and parings of the lard at the bottom of a roasting pan with half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, one chopped branch celery, two chopped branches parsley, one saltspoon thyme, one sprig bay-leaf, two cloves, four all-spice and eight whole black peppers. Lay the filet on the bed of the vegetables, etc. Season with a level tablespoon salt, evenly divided. Place a few little bits of butter over the surface of the fillet, the equivalent of one-quarter ounce. Pour in two tablespoons cold water at the bottom of the pan. Place the pan in a very hot oven to roast for fifteen minutes, then turn it over and roast for twenty minutes more, carefully basting it frequently with its own gravy while cooking. Remove it from the oven, dress on a hot dish and keep warm.
Skim off all the fat from the gravy of the roasting pan, then place the pan on a brisk fire. Add one gill tomato sauce and one and a half gills half glaze (demi-glace); reduce the sauce to one-half. Strain through a sieve into a small saucepan, add twelve whole canned mushrooms, one tablespoon good sherry wine, and boil the whole for five minutes, mixing well meanwhile, and pour it over the filet. Arrange six small stuffed tomatoes around the filet. Sprinkle a teaspoon finely chopped tarragon over all and serve.
A Delmonico-style roast tenderloin with a pan sauce built on demi-glace. Most of the work is prep; the roasting window is short and unforgiving.
- Oven and donenessThe book gives no temperatures; "a very hot oven" in period usage is usually read as somewhere around 450-500F. Thirty-five minutes total (fifteen, then twenty) will take a 2 1/2 lb trimmed tenderloin past rare in a modern oven, so cook to an instant-read temperature instead: 125F at the center for rare, 130-135F for medium rare, then rest 10 minutes before slicing.
- LardingLarding pork is fatback cut into long thin lardons and drawn through the meat with a hinged larding needle. Modern tenderloin is trimmed leaner than the 1900s article but the purpose is the same. If you have no needle, barding — tying thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the surface — gives most of the benefit.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce starts with 1/2 cup tomato sauce and 3/4 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. "One sprig bay-leaf" means a single leaf.
- The saltA level tablespoon of salt on 2 1/2 lb of meat is heavy by current taste, particularly with a reduced demi-glace sauce to follow. Two teaspoons of kosher salt over the whole surface suits modern palates better, and the sauce is best salted only after reducing.
- Demi-glaceHalf glaze is brown veal stock reduced with espagnole sauce until it coats a spoon. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; a plain reduced beef stock will not have the same body, so reduce it further or finish it with a small piece of cold butter.
- Reduction and sherryReducing 1 1/4 cups of combined sauce by half, then boiling five minutes more with mushrooms and sherry, concentrates salt sharply. Add the sherry near the end and taste before it goes on the meat.
- Stuffed tomatoesThe garnish is assumed knowledge in this book — small tomatoes hollowed and filled with a duxelles or a seasoned breadcrumb mixture, baked separately. Prepare them ahead; there is no time to make them while the filet rests.
- YieldServes five to six as a main course, cut in thick slices across the grain.
Larding answered a real problem: a whole tenderloin is lean and roasts dry without added fat, and nineteenth-century beef is generally thought to have carried less intramuscular fat than today's. The larding needle, used to draw batons of fatback through the muscle, was common equipment in professional kitchens and is rarely seen now. "Parisienne" in this period signals a restaurant-French garnish rather than a specific regional dish — here the demi-glace and tomato sauce base, whole mushrooms, sherry, stuffed tomatoes and chopped tarragon that turn a plain roast into a composed platter. The style is of a piece with the American hotel and club cooking of around 1900 associated with Delmonico's, where a filet was rarely sent out unadorned and the sauce, built in the roasting pan from the fond, was the measure of the cook.