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Filets Mignons, Shallots Sauce
Cut two pounds beef tenderloin in six even pieces, neatly flatten them and nicely trim all around; season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, well divided all over. Heat one tablespoon of butter in a frying pan, arrange on the mignons and briskly fry for three minutes on each side; arrange six toasts of bread on a hot dish, dress the filets on top, pour a shallots sauce over them and serve.
A plain steak-and-toast dish that depends entirely on two things: a properly hot pan and the shallot sauce made separately. The instructions below fill in what the original assumes a professional cook already knows.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper. With the half teaspoon of salt, that is a peppery seasoning by modern taste; scale the pepper back if you prefer.
- The cutTwo pounds of tenderloin in six pieces gives medallions of about 5 oz each. Cut them from the centre of the loin, and "neatly flatten" means a light press to an even thickness of roughly an inch, not pounding them thin.
- Pan heat is the hingeOne tablespoon of butter alone will burn before the meat browns. Get the pan properly hot, add a little neutral oil with the butter, and do not crowd six medallions into one pan -- work in two batches or the meat steams grey instead of searing.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing suits an inch-thick medallion taken to medium-rare, around 130F at the centre. Thinner pieces need two minutes; anything cooked much beyond this wastes the cut. Rest the meat a few minutes while you finish the sauce.
- The sauceThe recipe assumes a separate shallot sauce given elsewhere in the book; sauces under that name are generally shallots softened and reduced with wine or vinegar, then bound with a brown sauce. A modern equivalent is to deglaze the same pan with minced shallots and dry white wine or red, reduce hard, add a little beef stock, and mount with cold butter off the heat.
- ToastsThe recipe says only 'toasts of bread'. In practice, cut rounds of firm white bread slightly larger than the medallions, toasted and buttered or fried in butter, and set them on the hot dish to catch the sauce. Sliced sandwich bread will collapse.
- YieldSix servings as written, one medallion each, which suits a multi-course meal. As a main course on its own, four portions from the same two pounds is more realistic.
Filets mignons -- literally "dainty fillets" -- are the small medallions cut from the beef tenderloin, classically from its tapering end, and the term appears on American restaurant menus, drawn from French kitchen usage, from the later nineteenth century. Alessandro Filippini (his name is sometimes anglicised as Alexander), for many years a chef at Delmonico's in New York, wrote for a readership that wanted hotel cooking reproduced at home, and this entry is characteristic of the genre: a terse professional note, assuming the reader can already produce a brown sauce and knows what a croute is. Serving a sauteed medallion on a fried or toasted bread round was a common practice in that kitchen tradition, both to lift the meat off the platter and to soak up the sauce, and shallots -- milder and sweeter than onion when reduced in wine -- were a usual aromatic for a quick pan sauce.