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Noisettes of Beef, Sauce Remi
Neatly trim six four-ounce round pieces tenderloin of beef and season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper; place a tablespoon butter in a frying pan and as soon as it obtains a light brown add the noisettes and briskly cook for three minutes on each side. Dress on six round, small, freshly prepared toasts, pour the sauce Remi over the noisettes and serve.
A plain sauté of tenderloin medallions whose whole character depends on the sauce named in the title and on not overcooking beef that is only an inch or so thick. Everything else is assembly.
- YieldSix 4-ounce medallions serves six as a course in a long menu, or three people as a main dish. Trimmed tenderloin at that weight comes out roughly 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick.
- NoisetteFrench for "hazelnut," used for a small neat round of meat cut from the tenderloin or loin. Ask for center-cut filet and have it cut to weight rather than to thickness.
- The three minutes a sideThat timing assumes a hot pan and will land somewhere around medium-rare to medium on a medallion of this thickness, depending on the pan and the starting temperature of the meat. It is the hinge of the dish: tenderloin has almost no fat and turns dry and grainy past medium. If you want it rarer than the timing gives, pull at 125-130F internal and let the pieces rest five minutes while you finish the sauce.
- Butter that browns, not burnsOne tablespoon of butter is scant for six medallions and butter alone scorches at searing heat. Use two tablespoons, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and get the foam subsided and the color light brown before the meat goes in. Do not crowd the pan; work in two batches in a 10-inch skillet.
- Sauce RemiFilippini gives his sauces as separate entries, so the recipe here assumes you have already made the sauce and have it hot. Its composition is not stated in this entry; if you cannot locate it, any good demi-glace-based sauce built on the pan drippings will suit the dish. Have the sauce finished before the beef hits the pan, not after.
- The toastsCut rounds from firm white bread with a cutter roughly the diameter of the medallions, and toast them dry and crisp rather than golden-soft. Their job is to absorb sauce without collapsing, so a slightly stale crumb works better than fresh.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across 24 ounces of beef is about right by modern measure; season just before cooking and pat the surface dry so it browns instead of steaming.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its short numbered entries read like line notes from a professional kitchen rather than instructions for a home cook: trim, season, sear, dress, sauce, serve. Noisettes belong squarely to that world: uniform rounds of tenderloin that could be cooked to order in minutes and sent out on a crouton with whatever sauce the menu named that night. The proliferation of such names in Escoffier's era and in Delmonico's kitchens meant a single cut of beef could support many separate menu listings, and sauce Remi is one of many personal or commemorative sauce names of the period whose origin is not documented.