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Mignons of Beef, Sauce Poivrade
Cut two pounds trimmed tenderloin of beef in six equal filets, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, then lightly baste with a little oil, arrange on a broiler and broil for four minutes on each side. Arrange six freshly prepared slices of toast a quarter inch thick and of same size as filets on a hot dish, place filets on toast, then pour a hot poivrade sauce over and serve.
A plain grilled tenderloin dish whose whole character rests on the sauce, which the recipe assumes you already have simmering. Read the timing as a guide to thickness rather than doneness.
- Poivrade is a separate recipeSauce poivrade is a peppery brown sauce built on a mirepoix sweated in fat, deglazed with vinegar and white wine, moistened with demi-glace or a reduced brown stock, and finished with cracked peppercorns added only in the last few minutes. Add the pepper early and it turns harsh and bitter; it should be strained before serving. Have it made and hot before the beef goes near the fire.
- "Mignons"Six filets cut from a two-pound trimmed tenderloin give steaks of about five ounces each, likely something in the region of an inch or so thick depending on the diameter of the loin. Cut them from the centre of the loin so they are even, and tie each with string if the pieces are loose.
- Four minutes a sideThat timing suits a very hot broiler and an inch-thick steak, and it lands somewhere near rare to medium-rare. Judge by an instant-read thermometer instead: 125-130F for rare, 130-135F for medium-rare, checked at the centre.
- Broiler heatThe recipe says only "a broiler," which at the time could mean a grill over live coals or a gas broiler. Under a domestic overhead broiler, preheat fully and set the rack so the meat sits two to three inches from the element, or use a ripping-hot cast-iron pan for a better crust.
- "Baste with a little oil"Here it simply means brush the surfaces before cooking, not spoon fat over during. A neutral oil is right; butter will scorch at broiler heat.
- The toastQuarter-inch slices of toast cut to the size of the steaks, as the recipe directs, are structural as well as traditional: they catch the juices so the sauce is not thinned on the plate.
- Rest before saucingLet the filets stand three to five minutes on a warm plate before setting them on the toast. Skip it and the juices run out under the sauce and dilute it.
- YieldSix filets, one per person, as a main course with a vegetable garnish.
Sauce poivrade belongs to the classical French repertoire of brown sauces, and is traditionally the pepper sauce of the game kitchen. With red wine, and in some versions the blood of the animal, it becomes sauce chevreuil for venison. Pairing it with beef tenderloin, rather than furred game, is often said to have spread with hotel and restaurant cooking, when the tenderloin became the prestige cut and kitchens applied the grand sauces to it freely. The croûte beneath the meat is older still: setting grilled or sauced meat on fried bread was standard practice, and it survives in tournedos Rossini and its many relatives. That the recipe names the sauce without giving it is telling — books of this kind seem to have assumed a reader working from a set of foundation sauces kept going on the stove, with the individual dish being little more than an instruction for assembly.