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Filet of Beef, Watson
Neatly trim a little fat from surface of a two-and-a-half-pound piece filet of beef and season all over with a heavy teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Place a mirepoix in a small roasting pan, lay filet over, spread light tablespoon melted butter over beef, pour two tablespoons water in the pan, then set in oven for thirty-five minutes, turning and basting once in a while, remove filet, dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Skim fat off gravy in pan and place contents of pan in small saucepan. Pour in a gill white wine and reduce on fire to almost a glaze, pour in a gill broth and let reduce again to almost a glaze, then pour in a gill demi-glace, mix well and let boil for six minutes.
Finely slice six canned mushrooms, place in a small saucepan with two tablespoons sherry and cook for five minutes. Strain sauce through a cheesecloth into pan, mix well, cook for two minutes, pour sauce over filet, arrange six chestnut timbales around and serve.
A hotel-style roast filet with a classic reduction sauce. The method is sound, but the recipe assumes a professional kitchen where stock, demi-glace and garnishes are already standing by, and it never names an oven temperature.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was common in books written for cooks working a range they knew by feel. Thirty-five minutes for a 2.5 lb filet points to a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F; whether the centre comes out rare or medium-rare will depend on the thickness of the piece.
- Judge by thermometer, not clockA trimmed filet tapers, so timing alone is unreliable. Pull it at 120-125F in the thickest part for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, and rest ten minutes before carving; the sauce work gives you exactly that window.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Three gills are called for in the sauce: wine, broth, demi-glace, each reduced in turn.
- MirepoixHere it means the raw aromatic bed, not a finished preparation: diced onion, carrot and celery, often with a bay leaf and thyme, roughly a cup in total for a pan this size. It exists to flavour the pan juices and is discarded when the sauce is strained.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened in period practice with espagnole sauce. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a well-reduced homemade brown stock is the closer substitute. Stock cubes are not, as the whole sauce rests on that half cup.
- Reduce to almost a glazeThe hinge of the dish. Each addition must go down until it barely coats the pan before the next goes in, or the finished sauce will be thin and winey rather than glossy.
- Canned mushroomsUnremarkable in professional kitchens of this era and quite acceptable, but eight ounces of fresh cremini, sliced and sweated in butter before the sherry goes in, gives more flavour. Add them after straining so the slices stay whole in the sauce.
- Chestnut timbalesSmall moulds of chestnut puree bound with egg and baked in a water bath, a garnish assumed to be in the repertoire. Plain braised chestnuts, or roasted potatoes, serve the same purpose on a modern table.
- YieldA 2.5 lb trimmed filet serves four generously or six at a longer menu, which is what the six timbales imply.
This is restaurant French, and the give-away is the name: dishes titled after a person -- Watson, here -- were a stock-in-trade of hotel and club chefs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who might honour a patron, a proprietor or a colleague by attaching a name to a garnish and a sauce. Filet of beef with a wine-and-demi-glace reduction, mushrooms finished in sherry and a vegetable timbale garnish belongs to the Escoffier-era repertoire, scaled down from the brigade to a single cook. The recipe never explains mirepoix, demi-glace or a timbale, which suggests its readers were expected either to know the terms or to find them elsewhere in the book. Canned mushrooms appear without apology, as they do in other professional collections of the period.