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Filets Mignon, Sauce Minute
Cut from a two-pound piece of well-trimmed filet of beef six equal filets. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat one tablespoon butter in a frying pan, lay in the filets, one beside another briskly fry for three minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a large dish on top of six round pieces of toasted bread and keep warm. Skim the fat from the gravy of the pan, add one teaspoon flour; stir well, moisten with half gill claret and half gill white broth, adding half teaspoon freshly chopped chives; mix well and briskly boil until reduced to half the quantity. Pour over the filets and serve.
A straightforward pan-seared tenderloin with a quick deglazed sauce. Two details need translating: the gill, and the fact that a single tablespoon of butter will not carry six steaks.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. The sauce is built from 1/4 cup claret and 1/4 cup broth, reduced to about 1/4 cup total.
- Claret and white brothClaret means a dry red Bordeaux or any dry, moderately tannic red. "White broth" is a pale, unbrowned stock — light veal or chicken — as opposed to the dark brown stock used for heavier sauces.
- Cut and sizeTwo pounds of trimmed tenderloin divided six ways gives roughly 5 oz portions. Cut them 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches thick and stand them on end in the pan; thin medallions will be past rare before the crust forms.
- The fatOne tablespoon of butter is not enough to sear six filets, and butter alone will blacken at searing heat. Use two tablespoons of butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarified butter, in a pan wide enough that the filets do not touch.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing suits a heavy pan over fairly high heat and a 1 1/2-inch filet, landing at rare to medium-rare. Judge by an instant-read thermometer — 125–130F at the center — rather than the clock, and rest the meat while the sauce reduces.
- The hinge: the flourThe teaspoon of flour goes into the hot fat and must be stirred until it loses its raw smell before any liquid arrives, or the sauce tastes pasty. It is a very small amount by design; this is a glossy pan sauce, not gravy.
- Chives at the endChives lose their scent in a hard boil. Adding them with the wine as written is faithful to the original, but a second pinch stirred in off the heat gives the sauce its point.
- Toast roundsCut the croûtes to the diameter of the filets and toast or fry them in butter so they hold up. Their job is to absorb the juices; soft bread collapses.
- YieldSix filets, serving six as a main course with a vegetable and potatoes.
Filet mignon simply means "dainty filet" he small rending end of the beef tenderloin — and the dish belongs to the French restaurant repertoire that dominated hotel and club cooking in Europe and America around 1900, the world in which Filippini and his contemporaries worked. The name sauce minute is generally taken to describe the method rather than a fixed formula: the fond left in the searing pan is thickened with a trace of flour, moistened with wine and stock, and reduced while the meat rests, so the sauce is finished in the minute between cooking and serving. Serving each filet on a butter-crisped croûte is often said to have been common practice for sauced steaks and small cuts of the period, a way of catching juices that would otherwise pool on the platter; the same logic underlies the toast beneath game birds and the fried bread under tournedos.