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Filets Mignons, Wright
Cut out from two-pound filet of beef six equal pieces; lightly flatten and neatly trim, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper and keep on a plate until required. Finely chop ten peeled and thoroughly cleaned medium, fresh mushrooms; place in a frying pan with one and a half tablespoons butter and lightly brown for eight minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, then add a tablespoon flour and stir well; pour in one gill cream and two tablespoons sherry, season with two teaspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and let boil for five minutes, then keep hot. Prepare six tartlet crusts evenly divide the mushroom preparation into them and lay on a hot dish. Briskly fry the six filets in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter for three minutes on each side, then place them on top of the tartlet crusts. Pour a freshly prepared hot Bearnaise sauce over the filets, arrange a very thin slice of truffle on top of each and serve hot.
A composed plate rather than a single dish: three preparations (a mushroom cream, a tart shell, a Béarnaise) have to land hot at the same moment as the beef. Read it backwards and get the shells and sauce ready before the steaks touch the pan.
- Old measuresA gill is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so the seasoning here is 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Cut the beef thinSix pieces from a 2 lb trimmed tenderloin gives roughly 5 oz each, and the instruction to lightly flatten them suggests something in the region of 3/4 inch thick, though the recipe never says. Three minutes a side in butter suits that sort of thickness for medium-rare; a much thicker tournedos would still be nearly raw in the centre.
- The salt is out of proportionTwo teaspoons of salt in a mushroom mixture built on 1/2 cup cream will read as brine, especially under a Béarnaise that is itself seasoned. Start with 1/2 teaspoon and correct at the end.
- The mushroom baseEssentially a duxelles, though without the usual shallot, thickened into a cream sauce. Chop the mushrooms fine and cook until the pan is dry and they have taken colour before the flour goes in, or the sherry and cream will taste raw and the filling will slacken in the pastry.
- Tartlet crustsBlind-bake shortcrust shells about 2 1/2 to 3 inches across and keep them warm and dry. Fill them at the last moment; the mushroom cream will soften the pastry within minutes.
- Béarnaise, freshly preparedThe recipe is right to insist on it. Make the tarragon-vinegar reduction and mount the egg yolks with warm butter while the steaks rest, and hold the sauce off direct heat, around 130-140F, so it neither sets nor splits.
- TruffleA thin shaving of fresh black truffle if the season allows; otherwise a preserved truffle slice, patted dry. Truffle oil is a different flavour and does not substitute here.
- YieldSix plates, one filet each, as a main course.
Filet mignon means simply "dainty fillet," the name French butchers gave the small rounds cut from the tapering end of the beef tenderloin, and by the turn of the twentieth century it had become one of the standard luxury cuts of hotel and restaurant cooking in America. The construction here is pure grand-restaurant French of that era: a duxelles of mushrooms bound with flour and cream, a pastry case to carry it, Béarnaise poured over, a slice of truffle on top as the finishing mark of expense. Béarnaise itself is generally traced to a restaurant at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, named for the birthplace of Henri IV rather than for anything cooked in Béarn. The surname attached to the title follows the habit of professional cookbooks of the period, where dishes were named for the patrons, colleagues or public figures a chef wished to honour, and the person behind the name is usually now unrecoverable.