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Filets Mignons, Mushroom Sauce
Neatly flatten, trim and place on a plate six small filets of four ounces each. Season all around with one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat two tablespoons lard in a frying pan, lay the filets in the pan, one beside another, and briskly cook for three minutes on each side. Remove, arrange on a hot dish over six round bread croutons, pour a mushroom sauce over and serve.
A bare-bones professional formula of the Delmonico school: the sauce is assumed, not given, and the timings assume a hot, heavy pan. A few things need translating.
- The cutFour-ounce filets from the tenderloin — what a butcher today would call medallions or tournedos. The recipe specifies weight but not thickness. "Neatly flatten" means pressing them lightly to an even thickness, not pounding them thin.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard is simply a high-smoke-point fat. Clarified butter, beef tallow or a neutral oil behave the same way; whole butter alone will burn before the crust forms.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing is accurate only in a genuinely hot pan with the filets spaced apart, and gives a rare to medium-rare centre on a 1-inch medallion. Crowding six pieces into one domestic skillet drops the temperature and steams them; use two pans or work in batches.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon white pepper season a pound and a half of meat (six four-ounce filets). White pepper was widely preferred in kitchens of this period so that no black specks showed against pale sauce.
- CroutonsNot the salad kind. These are rounds of bread, conventionally fried, set under the meat to catch juices; the recipe gives no further detail.
- The mushroom sauceFilippini expects you to fetch it from the sauce chapter: a brown sauce (espagnole or demi-glace) finished with sliced sautéed mushrooms. A modern equivalent is mushrooms browned in the same pan, deglazed with sherry or Madeira, and bound with reduced beef stock and a little butter.
- Rest the meatThe recipe sends the filets straight to the dish. Two or three minutes of rest before saucing keeps the juices in the meat rather than in the crouton.
- YieldSix filets, six servings, though a four-ounce medallion is a modest portion by present standards.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its style is that of a professional kitchen writing for other professionals: terse, sequenced, and confident that the reader already has a stockpot of brown sauce going. Filet mignon means something like "dainty fillet" in French, and in classical usage it referred to the small tapering end of the beef tenderloin rather than to the whole muscle; American menus broadened it to mean any round steak cut from the tenderloin. The crouton beneath the meat is a signature of the Escoffier-era repertoire, and it exists for practical reasons as much as ornamental ones, insulating the meat from the cooling plate and absorbing sauce.