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Filet of Beef, William II
Trim the fat and skin off a nice, medium, tender filet of beef. Cut two truffles, two ounces uncooked lean ham and two ounces larding pork in oblong-shaped pieces, with larding needle lard filet alternately with each of the three articles, season all around with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Place a mirepoix in a roasting pan, lay filet over, spread a little melted butter on top and set in oven for thirty-five minutes, being careful to baste once in a while, remove, dress on a hot dish and keep hot. Cut a cover from each of twelve very small, even-sized red tomatoes, scoop out meat and season interior of each. Remove skin from six raw sausages, place in a bowl with two tablespoons cream, a saltspoon cayenne and finely chopped truffle. Mix thoroughly, fill inside of tomatoes with preparation and place a slice of truffle on top of each tomato. Arrange on a tin, lightly baste with a little melted butter, set in oven seventeen minutes, remove and keep hot. Prepare six timbales of spinach, six timbales of potatoes, and arrange the three articles around filet; that is to say, one timbale spinach, a tomato, a timbale potato, a tomato, a spinach, and so on. Place a cooked fresh mushroom on top of each timbale and serve with the following sauce separately. Remove fat from gravy in filet, place contents of pan in a small saucepan, add a few mushroom tails, pour in a gill Rhine wine and let reduce on range to almost a glaze. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace, lightly mix, boil for ten minutes, strain through cheesecloth into a sauce bowl and serve separately.
A grand-hotel plated roast: larded beef tenderloin with three garnishes and a wine-reduction sauce served apart. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes a cook who already knows what a mirepoix and a timbale are, and it never once names an oven temperature.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book was written for a coal range and leaves the judgement to the cook. A hot oven, 425-450F, is a reasonable modern reading of thirty-five minutes for a whole trimmed tenderloin, and the stuffed tomatoes can take the same heat.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThirty-five minutes suits a 3-4 lb center-cut filet to medium-rare, but tenderloins vary wildly in thickness. Pull at 125-130F internal and rest 10-15 minutes; the larding will not save an overcooked one.
- LardingA larding needle threads strips of fat and flavoring through the meat. If you have no needle, pierce with a thin boning knife and push the batons in, or tie a sheet of fatback over the top and tuck the truffle and ham slivers under it. "Larding pork" is fresh unsalted fatback, not bacon.
- MirepoixHere it is a bed of roughly diced onion, carrot and celery under the meat, used to lift it off the pan and flavor the drippings. It is not eaten; it is strained out with the sauce.
- The sausage filling needs to be cooked throughRaw sausage meat mixed with cream and stuffed into a tomato is a slow heater. Seventeen minutes at 425F is usually enough for very small tomatoes, but check that the filling reaches 160F rather than trusting the timing.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the Rhine wine is 4 fl oz and the demi-glace 6 fl oz. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for six sausages' worth of filling; scale it back if you are wary.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; if you use plain beef stock instead, reduce it hard first or the sauce will be thin. A dry Riesling stands in for "Rhine wine."
- TimbalesSmall dariole or ramekin molds, buttered, packed with seasoned spinach purée or duchesse potato and warmed through, then turned out. Six of each are called for.
- YieldTwelve tomatoes and twelve timbales (six spinach, six potato) indicate about six servings: two tomatoes and one timbale of each kind per plate, following the alternating ring the recipe describes.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a compendium by a longtime chef of Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a whole genre of turn-of-the-century dishes christened after reigning monarchs and heads of state. William II is Kaiser Wilhelm II, German emperor from 1888 to 1918, and the German nod is carried by the Rhine wine in the sauce rather than by anything structurally German about the dish, which is thoroughly French in method: larded filet, mirepoix, demi-glace, a ring of alternating garnishes. Naming conventions like this were partly flattery and partly menu marketing, and they dated fast. Within a decade of publication a dish honoring the Kaiser was likely to have been quietly renamed or dropped from American menus altogether, if it followed the fate that demonstrably overtook so much German-labeled food during the First World War.