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Larded Filet of Beef, Providence
Procure a two-and-a-half-pound piece filet of beef, remove all fat and skin from top, then lard with a few thin strips of pork on top. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Place a mirepoix in a roasting pan, lay filet on top. Finely chop the fat trimmed off from top of beef and place in pan around the filet. Set to roast in oven thirty-five minutes, frequently turning and basting. Remove, dress on a hot dish. Arrange six timbales of rice around the filet and keep hot.
Skim the fat from surface of gravy in the pan. Then pour in one gill demi-glace, half gill tomato sauce, and let boil ten minutes. Finely slice six canned mushrooms and twelve stoned olives, place in a saucepan with half gill sherry and let reduce five minutes. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer into this pan, boil ten minutes, then pour sauce over the filet. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A Delmonico's-style roast filet from the era when a kitchen kept demi-glace and tomato sauce standing by. The recipe assumes both, plus a hot oven it never names.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which in 1906 meant the cook judged it. Thirty-five minutes for a 2.5 lb filet implies a hot oven, roughly 425-450F, and even then the cut should be pulled by thermometer at 125-130F for rare, 135F for medium-rare, not by the clock.
- A gillHalf a cup. So the sauce is 1/2 cup demi-glace, 1/4 cup tomato sauce, and 1/4 cup sherry.
- Demi-glaceThe hinge of the dish. This is reduced brown veal stock plus espagnole, and nothing in a supermarket bottle is the same thing. Use a good frozen demi-glace or reduce 2 cups of dark veal or beef stock to about half a cup; a thin stock will leave you with a watery pan sauce that no amount of boiling will fix.
- LardingStrips of pork fat laid over or drawn through the meat, since a trimmed filet has no fat of its own. Thin-sliced fatback or unsmoked barding fat tied on top does the job; bacon works but brings smoke and cure flavour the original did not intend.
- MirepoixRough-cut onion, carrot and celery as a roasting bed, not a garnish. It is there to flavour the drippings and is discarded when the sauce is strained.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the same work; the point is to catch the mirepoix and browned solids before the sauce meets the mushrooms and olives.
- Timbales of riceCooked seasoned rice packed into small dariole moulds and turned out. Ramekins or a half-cup measure, packed firmly and inverted, give the same effect.
- RestingThe recipe sends the filet straight to a hot dish while the sauce boils twenty minutes. That is in effect a long rest, so carve at the last moment and warm the platter well, or the meat will be cold when it reaches the table.
- YieldSix timbales indicates six servings; a 2.5 lb trimmed filet is generous for that number.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written by a man who had spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and it shows in every line: the pre-made demi-glace and tomato sauce, the mirepoix bed, the moulded rice, the canned mushrooms and stoned olives that a well-stocked hotel larder always had open. Filippini's habit was to name variations of a standard preparation after places, people and patrons, and "Providence" here reads as a garnish formula rather than a claim about Rhode Island cooking; similar filets appear elsewhere in the book under other names with the sauce and garnish shuffled. Larding was still routine at the time because filet, then as now, carries almost no fat of its own, and roasting was done in a range oven whose temperature the cook estimated by experience rather than by dial.