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Noisettes of Beef, Chateaubriand
Cut out from a two-pound piece of filet of beef six equal noisettes. Neatly flatten and place on a plate. Season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cut three large, peeled and washed potatoes into olive forms, wash and drain. Place in a frying pan with one and a half tablespoons of melted butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and gently brown for twenty-five minutes, frequently turning meanwhile. Pour the butter of the pan into another frying pan, thoroughly heat, place the noisettes into this pan, one beside another, and briskly fry for three minutes on each side. Remove, arrange on a hot dish, crown-like, place the potatoes in the centre, pour a Chateaubriand sauce around the noisettes and serve.
A restaurant-style plate reduced to its bones: six small tenderloin steaks, turned potatoes browned in butter, and a sauce the book expects you to have already made. Read the sauce note first, since the dish is named for something that is not in the ingredient list.
- The sauce is elsewhereChateaubriand sauce is a separate recipe in books of this kind — a white wine and shallot reduction cooked down with veal stock or demi-glace, finished with butter, tarragon and lemon. Without it this is simply pan-fried filet, so have it made and warm before the meat goes in the pan.
- NoisettesA noisette is a small round steak cut from the tenderloin, trimmed clean of fat and sinew. Six from a two-pound filet gives pieces of roughly 4 to 5 oz, about an inch thick; tie them or press them into shape so they cook evenly.
- "Olive forms"The potatoes are turned — pared with a small knife into olive or barrel shapes, conventionally given seven faces; olive forms are smaller than the larger chateau cut, an inch to an inch and a half long. Use a firm waxy or all-purpose potato; the trimmings are worth keeping for soup.
- Twenty-five minutes for potatoesThat is correct for turned potatoes in butter over gentle heat, but only if they are genuinely small and the pan is not crowded. Dry them thoroughly after washing or they will steam rather than colour, and keep the heat low enough that the butter does not blacken before the centres are done.
- Frying in the potato butterA tablespoon and a half of butter will be well browned and partly absorbed by the time the potatoes are out. Top it up, and add a little oil or clarified butter, since whole butter alone will burn at the heat needed to sear beef.
- Three minutes a sideThat suits an inch-thick noisette in a properly hot heavy pan, giving rare to medium-rare — around 125-130F at the centre. The pan must be hot before the meat touches it, and the steaks must not be moved for the first two minutes if you want a crust.
- RestingThe original sends the meat straight to the dish. Give the noisettes three or four minutes on a warm plate before saucing; the sauce goes around them, not over, so a little rest does not cool the presentation.
- YieldSix noisettes serve six as a plated course, or three generously as a main. Salt of a teaspoon for two pounds of beef is on the modest side by current habits.
Chateaubriand takes its name from François-René de Chateaubriand, the writer and diplomat of the Napoleonic and Restoration era; the cut and the sauce are traditionally credited to his cook, generally said to be one Montmireil, though the attribution rests on nineteenth-century kitchen lore rather than documentation. In French professional usage the word came to mean both a thick centre-cut piece of filet grilled or roasted whole and the shallot-and-white-wine sauce served with it, which is why a recipe here can call for "a Chateaubriand sauce" as a known quantity and move on. The dish belongs to the Franco-American restaurant repertoire that books of this period drew on heavily — filet cut into neat portions, potatoes turned by hand, a sauce assumed to be standing ready — a style built for a brigade of cooks and transcribed, more or less unchanged, for the household reader.