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Noisettes of Beef, Foyot
Procure six small filets of beef one inch thick by one and a half inches in diameter. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, well divided all around. Heat in a black frying pan a tablespoon melted butter, add the filets, one beside another, and briskly fry for three minutes on each side. Remove and place them on six freshly prepared toasts of the same size as the filets. Reduce two gills tomato sauce in a saucepan to half gill. Prepare a Bearnaise sauce. Strain the tomato sauce through a cheesecloth into the Bearnaise. Mix a little with a whisk and pour it over the filets. Garnish the filets all around with spinach and send to the table.
A restaurant plate scaled to six, and the only difficulty is timing: the beef takes six minutes, the two sauces take rather longer, so build the sauces first and hold them warm.
- NoisettesSmall rounds cut from the tenderloin — here an inch thick and an inch and a half across, so roughly an ounce each. A butcher will cut them from the tail end of a whole filet; medallions from the same muscle are the same thing under another name.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of tomato sauce is one cup, reduced to a quarter cup — a heavy, concentrated reduction. That concentration is the point: a thin tomato sauce will only slacken the bearnaise.
- A black frying panCast iron or heavy carbon steel. The recipe wants a pan that holds its heat when six cold pieces of beef go in at once, and a thin modern nonstick pan will not sear them.
- Three minutes a sideOn inch-thick filets in a properly hot pan this will come out rare to medium-rare. A tablespoon of butter for six filets is barely enough; add a little oil to keep it from blackening while the pan heats.
- Holding the béarnaiseThe hinge of the dish. Béarnaise is an egg-yolk emulsion and splits above roughly 160F. Keep it off direct heat, and let the reduced tomato cool to warm before straining it in — mix gently, not vigorously.
- The toastsCut rounds of firm white bread with a cutter the diameter of the filets and fry or toast them in butter until crisp. They exist to absorb the juices and keep the sauce from flooding the plate, so they need to be dry and crisp, not soft.
- SpinachPlainly boiled or buttered spinach, well drained and pressed — wet spinach will thin the sauce it touches.
- YieldSix servings, one noisette each as part of a longer menu. For a main course at a modern table, count two per person and scale the sauces accordingly.
The name points to Foyot, the Paris restaurant that stood by the Luxembourg Palace and fed the Senate until it closed in the 1930s; a good many nineteenth-century dishes carry its name, and the classical sauce Foyot is a béarnaise enriched with meat glaze. What is described here is not quite that — béarnaise finished with a reduction of tomato is closer to what the classical repertoire calls Choron, and the looseness is typical of the period, when restaurant garnish names traveled faster than any fixed definition of them. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and its French entries read as a working chef's shorthand: a filet, a toast, two sauces already standing in the kitchen, assembled to order. The instruction to prepare a béarnaise, with no method given, assumes a reader who either knows it or has a saucier who does.