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Tenderloin of Beef, Cassatt
Neatly trim a little fat from a two-and-a-half-pound piece tenderloin of beef, season it all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Place mirepoix in a roasting pan, lay beef over, baste with a little melted butter, pour two tablespoons water in pan, then set in oven for twenty-five minutes, turning and basting once in a while. Remove, lift up filet, cut in twelve even slices and arrange in baking dish, one overlapping another. Place in a saucepan one ounce butter with a finely sliced sound onion and gently brown for four minutes. Add six well-cleaned, sliced, fresh mushrooms, two tablespoons good sherry, and nicely brown for five minutes more, stirring once in a while. Add two tablespoons flour, mix well, pour in one and a half gills broth, season with three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne, and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply mix, let cook for five minutes, add egg yolk and briskly mix while heating for one minute. Pour sauce over filet, sprinkle a tablespoon fresh bread crumbs over all, set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and serve in same dish with a Finnoise sauce separately.
A Delmonico-style dish in two stages: the tenderloin is roasted rare, sliced, then finished under a thickened mushroom sauce. The hinge is the egg yolk — once it goes in, the sauce must not boil.
- The egg yolkBeat the yolk with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, then return it off the heat and warm for no more than a minute, as the recipe directs. The flour in the sauce gives some protection, but a hard boil after the yolk goes in risks a grainy, curdled finish.
- MirepoixA bed of roughly diced aromatic vegetables, typically carrot, onion and celery, often with bay and thyme and sometimes ham or bacon fat, laid under the meat to keep it off the pan and flavour the drippings. It is not eaten; strain and use the pan juices in the sauce if you like.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Twenty-five minutes for a 2.5 lb tenderloin implies a hot oven, 450F, which will bring the centre to rare. Aim for 120-125F internal, since the slices get a further fifteen minutes in the oven under the sauce.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of broth is about 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 and 1/8 teaspoon respectively.
- Doneness, revisedThe second bake is meant to glaze the crumbs and heat the sauce, not to cook the beef. Fifteen minutes at 450F will push rare slices to medium. Ten minutes at 400F, or a few minutes under the broiler, gets the browning without greying the meat.
- The sauce baseTwo tablespoons flour to 3/4 cup broth is a thick, masking sauce by modern taste, though the sherry and the liquid from the mushrooms loosen it somewhat. Add more broth if you want it to coat a spoon and still pour.
- Finnoise sauceAn obscure classical sauce, generally described as a velouté finished with herbs and a little paprika. A madeira or bordelaise served separately is a reasonable stand-in.
- YieldTwelve slices, serving six as a main course.
Filippini spent years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, where the house habit was to attach the names of regular patrons and public figures to dishes. Who "Cassatt" was is not established by the book; Alexander J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and brother of the painter Mary Cassatt, is the usual guess, but no contemporary source ties the dish to him. The construction is characteristic of late-nineteenth-century restaurant practice: roast the expensive cut barely done, slice it, shingle the slices in a dish they can be sent to table in, mask them with a bound sauce and glaze the top with crumbs. That is the sort of treatment a hotel kitchen used for a filet it wanted to hold and finish to order, which would account for the beef being left underdone at the first roasting.