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Minced Tenderloin, Point Du Jour
Cut a pound of tenderloin into twelve even slices. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the beef, and briskly cook for one minute on each side. Remove and dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, and keep warm. Add four finely chopped shallots to the pan, cook for a minute, then add half gill claret, half gill demi-glace, and half a teaspoon finely chopped chives; then let briskly reduce for five minutes. Pour over the beef and serve.
A five-minute sauté with a pan sauce, written for a cook who already has stock reductions on hand. The only real obstacles are the archaic measures and the word "minced."
- "Minced" means slicedThis is the French émincé — thin slices — not ground meat. Twelve slices from a pound gives medallions of a little over an ounce each; cut them about 1/4 inch thick and flatten lightly so they cook through in the minute a side allowed.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so two is 1/2 teaspoon white pepper. A gill is 1/2 cup (4 fl oz) in American usage but 5 fl oz in British measure; read half a gill as roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz each of claret and demi-glace.
- ClaretNineteenth-century English and American usage for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked, since it will concentrate as the sauce reduces.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with espagnole sauce to a syrupy glaze. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace is sold now; a well-reduced homemade brown stock is the honest substitute. Bouillon cubes are not — the salt concentrates badly in a quarter-cup reduction.
- The hinge: a hot, dry panOne minute a side only browns meat if the pan is genuinely hot and the slices are dry and not crowded. Work in two batches with a tablespoon of butter each rather than steaming all twelve at once.
- Watch the reductionHalf a cup of liquid over five minutes on a brisk flame can reduce to almost nothing. Pull it when it coats a spoon; if it tightens too far, loosen with a spoonful of stock and swirl in cold butter off the heat.
- Resting juicesThe beef will weep on the hot dish while the sauce cooks. Tip that liquid back into the pan with the shallots rather than leaving it under the meat.
- YieldA pound of tenderloin and this much sauce serves two generously, or four as part of a longer menu. Add the chives at the end if you want their colour to survive.
The tag Point du Jour follows the old kitchen convention of naming a garnish or finish after a place — the name is often taken to refer to the locality on the western edge of Paris, near the Seine at Boulogne, whose name means "daybreak," though the connection is not documented. Such names may have been attached by chefs to fix a particular treatment in the repertoire rather than to record any local tradition, and the same dish might appear elsewhere as simply tournedos au vin rouge. What the recipe really documents is the working method of the grand hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period: an expensive cut cut small, cooked to order in seconds, and finished with a splash of wine into a demi-glace that had been simmering since morning. The entire dish depends on that pre-made stock reduction, which is why the instruction assumes it without comment.