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Filets Mignon, Fin De Siecle
Cut from two pounds of filet six equal pieces, lightly flatten them, season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Finely chop two ounces raw veal, half a green pepper and half a bean garlic; place in a mortar with three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, pound to a smooth paste, add one egg yolk, one tablespoon of cream, and mix well. Evenly spread this force on both sides of the filets and carefully roll filets in melted butter, then in bread crumbs. Peel and thoroughly wash six heads fresh mushrooms and place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter. Season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, fry for four minutes on each side, lift them up and keep on a plate. Arrange the filets in the mushroom pan, one beside another, and gently fry for six minutes on each side. Have six round, freshly prepared pieces of toast placed on a hot dish, arrange the filets over them, then place a mushroom on top of each filet. Pour a Bordelaise sauce around the filets and serve.
A turn-of-the-century steak dish that coats filets in a veal forcemeat before frying. The technique is sound; only the measurements and the timing need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. "Three saltspoons salt" is 3/4 teaspoon, and one saltspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon each.
- "Half a bean garlic"A "bean" of garlic in books of this period is generally taken to mean a clove, or a clove-sized piece, so this is a very small amount. A full clove is closer to modern taste.
- Total seasoningRead the salt figures together before you start: a teaspoon on the meat, 3/4 teaspoon in the forcemeat, and another teaspoon for six mushrooms. The mushroom salt in particular is worth cutting by half.
- Mushroom headsThese are caps, stems removed. Peeling was standard when mushrooms arrived gritty and field-grown; cultivated ones today need only a wipe, and the skin carries flavour.
- The timing is the problemSix minutes a side over frying-pan heat will take a filet well past medium. If you want the interior pink, sear the crumbed filets and finish them briefly in a 400F oven, pulling them at about 130F internal for medium-rare. The forcemeat is raw veal, so it must be firm and cooked through where it meets the crust.
- Crumb coatingButter then crumbs, with no flour or egg wash, gives a thin fragile shell. Press the crumbs on firmly, chill the filets fifteen minutes before frying, and turn them once only.
- Bordelaise sauceAssumed knowledge in this book: red wine reduced with shallots and often marrow, finished with a brown veal stock. Make it before you start the filets, as the meat will not wait.
- YieldSix filets from two pounds of tenderloin, on toast rounds — six servings, and generous ones given the forcemeat.
"Fin de siècle" -- end of the century -- was the fashionable label of the 1890s and 1900s, attached to everything from art movements to hotel menu items as a way of saying up-to-the-minute. Applied to a steak, it signals restaurant cooking of the moment rather than any regional tradition: dressing a filet with a pounded veal forcemeat, a fried mushroom cap, a toast crouton and a Bordelaise sauce fits the grand-hotel practice of the Escoffier era, where a small piece of tenderloin was built up into a composed plate. The mortar and pestle in the instructions is worth noticing: before domestic food processors, any smooth forcemeat meant pounding by hand.