Home › The World's Kitchen › Mignons of Beef, Hussarde
Mignons of Beef, Hussarde
After procuring from your butcher six nice, tender, even filets mignons of four ounces each, neatly trim and lightly flatten. Season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Gently roll in flour, then dip in beaten egg and then lightly in bread crumbs, finally turning them over in two tablespoons sweet oil on a plate. Arrange on a broiler and broil for five minutes on each side. Have a brown horseradish sauce on a hot dish; arrange the mignons crown shape over the horseradish sauce. Decorate the dish nicely with glazed, small white onions, and the sweet corn placed in the centre of the crown, then serve.
A straightforward breaded-and-broiled filet, but the original assumes you already know how to make the two components it names and never explains — a brown horseradish sauce and glazed onions. Read it as an assembly instruction for a plated dish rather than a full recipe.
- YieldSix 4 oz filets, one per person, so six servings as a main course. The corn and onions are garnish quantities: figure a cup of kernels and 18-24 small onions.
- Sweet oilPeriod shorthand for olive oil — "sweet" meaning fresh rather than rancid, not sweetened. Two tablespoons rolled over the crumbed filets on a plate is just enough to keep the coating from scorching.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes a side takes a 4 oz filet well past medium and dries out one of the leanest cuts on the animal. Under a modern broiler, three minutes a side with the meat about four inches from the element gets you 130-135F at the centre; pull it and rest five minutes.
- Watch the crumbs, not the clockEgg-and-crumb coating under direct radiant heat browns fast and then blackens. If the crust colours before the interior is where you want it, drop the pan a rack lower or finish in a 400F oven.
- Brown horseradish sauceNot a cream sauce — this is the classic sauce espagnole or demi-glace with freshly grated horseradish stirred in off the heat. Adding the horseradish to a simmering sauce cooks out the pungency, so it goes in last, and the sauce goes under the meat, not over it.
- Glazed white onionsSmall peeled onions simmered in stock with butter and a pinch of sugar until the liquid reduces to a syrupy coating. Pearl or cipollini onions work; allow 25-30 minutes so they cook through before the glaze tightens.
- Sweet cornThis may well have meant canned kernels, drained and heated in butter. Fresh kernels cut from two or three ears, cooked briefly in butter, are better and take two minutes.
- Crown shapeThe filets stand on edge, leaning inward in a ring around the centre of the platter, with the corn heaped inside and the onions around the outside. It only holds if the platter is hot and the sauce thick enough to grip the base of each medallion.
"Hussarde" — a la hussarde, in the manner of the Hungarian light cavalryman — is one of a family of nineteenth-century French garnish names often said to have signalled paprika, horseradish or onions, the flavours European cooks associated with Central Europe and its horsemen. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire lists a sauce hussarde built on wine, onion, ham and grated horseradish, and this dish belongs to the same idea: a brown sauce sharpened with horseradish, with onions in support. Filippini's book comes out of the Delmonico's tradition in New York, where the international garnish name was part of the appeal, and the format here is typical of the period's restaurant writing — the sauce and the glazed onions are assumed to be standing ready in the kitchen, so the recipe covers only the broiling and the plating. The breadcrumb coating on a filet mignon is unusual to modern eyes.