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Mignons of Beef, Cahor
Neatly trim a little of the fat of a two-pound piece tenderloin of beef, then cut it in six even mignons, lightly flatten, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, arrange the mignons in it one beside another and quickly fry for two minutes on each side, lift up with fork and keep them on a plate until required.
Thoroughly wipe three fresh, medium tomatoes cut in halves, season evenly with half teaspoon each salt and sugar and two saltspoons pepper, lightly roll in flour, then place them in the mignons frying pan and gently cook for three minutes on each side; remove, dress on a baking dish and place filets on top of tomatoes. Prepare and pour a Mornay sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon bread crumbs over the mignons, set in the oven eight minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward tournedos dish that assumes you already know how to make Mornay sauce and can read an unmarked oven. Two details need pinning down: the sauce, which the recipe never specifies, and the final bake, which is a browning step rather than a cooking one.
- Mignons means tournedosA two-pound tenderloin cut into six gives steaks of roughly 5 oz each, about an inch thick once lightly flattened. Center-cut filet is what is wanted; the tapered tail end will not hold an even shape.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is half a teaspoon across three tomatoes. That is a great deal of pepper by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks would want.
- The Mornay is on youThe recipe leaves the sauce to be taken from elsewhere in the book; classically a Mornay is a béchamel enriched with egg yolk and cheese, usually Gruyère with a little Parmesan. Figure on about a cup and a half of finished sauce for six mignons, loose enough to coat but thick enough not to run off onto the dish.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the step reads as a browning rather than a cooking one. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, for the stated eight minutes should set the crumbs and color the sauce; a broiler for two or three minutes does the same job with less risk of overcooking the beef.
- The two-minute sear is deliberateTwo minutes a side in butter leaves the filets rare, which is the point, since they finish under the sauce in the oven. Cook them through at the pan stage and they will come out of the gratin gray and dry.
- Flouring the tomatoesThe flour coating helps the halved tomatoes hold together in the pan and gives them some body as a platform for the beef. Use firm, underripe fruit and cut through the equator, not the stem end.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon is optimistic for six steaks in a modern pan. Use enough to film the surface, and keep the fond, since the tomatoes cook in the same pan and take up the browned residue.
- YieldSix mignons, so six modest portions or three generous ones. Serve straight from the baking dish while the crumb topping is still crisp.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose International Cook Book (1906) gathered several thousand short entries in exactly this style. "Cahor" points to Cahors, the town on the Lot in southwest France known for its dark tannic red wine, though no wine appears in the recipe itself; in the grammar of nineteenth-century restaurant cookery a geographic tag on a garnished filet was often a house label rather than a strict regional citation, and Filippini used such names freely to organize a very large book. The Mornay sauce is generally traced to Parisian restaurant kitchens of the mid-1800s and is traditionally said to honor a member of the de Mornay family, though the attribution is not documented. What the dish really shows is the standard construction of the period: a seared filet set on a vegetable base, masked with a cheese sauce, crumbed and glazed.