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Tenderloin of Beef, Trevise
Have a piece of tenderloin of beef larded and cooked. When cooked, remove it from the pan, lay it on a hot dish and keep warm. Skim the fat from the surface of the gravy; place the pan on the fire, pour in half gill tomato sauce and half gill demi-glace thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon; let boil for five minutes; strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer over the filet. Arrange six medium stuffed tomatoes around the filet and serve.
A classic hotel-kitchen presentation that assumes you already know how to roast a larded tenderloin; the written portion is really the pan sauce and the garnish. Read it as a finishing method rather than a full recipe.
- Half a gillA gill is 4 fl oz in American measure, so half a gill is 2 fl oz, about 4 tablespoons. The two sauces together come to roughly half a cup before reduction — a napping sauce for the sliced meat, not a pool.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole combined with brown stock and reduced by half; in a hotel kitchen of this period it would generally have been kept ready at the sauce station. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a hard-reduced brown veal or beef stock stands in; a bouillon cube will read as salt rather than depth.
- Chinese strainerThe chinois, a conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve does the same job; the cone shape simply lets you work the sauce through with the back of a ladle.
- LardingThreading strips of pork back fat through the lean meat with a larding needle, standard practice when beef was leaner and roasted longer. With modern tenderloin it is optional; barding — tying a sheet of fat or bacon over the top — gives most of the benefit with none of the equipment.
- Cooking the tenderloinThe original says only that a piece of tenderloin is larded and cooked in a pan; it gives no size, temperature or timing. If you are working from a modern centre cut, sear it, then roast hot (around 425F) and pull it at 125-130F internal for medium-rare — roughly 25-35 minutes for 2-3 lb. Rest 10 minutes before slicing, which is also the window in which you make the sauce.
- DeglazingSkim the fat, but leave the browned fond. Five minutes of boiling with only about half a cup of liquid will reduce it sharply, so add the sauces off the heat first, scrape the pan clean, then return it to the burner.
- Stuffed tomatoesNot specified here; a reader was expected to know them, and period versions run to small tomatoes hollowed, seasoned, filled with something like a duxelles or a rice-and-herb stuffing, and baked until just tender. Six of them suggests six portions.
- YieldSix servings, going by the garnish. A 2 1/2 to 3 lb trimmed tenderloin fits that count.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century restaurant cooking named beef garnishes after places, people and patrons, and the resulting shorthand filled the menus of grand hotels: a filet Trevise told the kitchen exactly which sauce and which garnish to send out, without a word of explanation. Trevise is the French form of Treviso, the city north of Venice, and such names were generally applied loosely — a nod to Italy here supplied by the tomato sauce and the stuffed tomatoes rather than by anything documented in Veneto cooking. Filippini's International Cook Book came out of exactly this world; he had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, where a cook was expected to keep demi-glace and tomato sauce standing on the stove. The brevity of the instructions is not carelessness but a professional's assumption that the foundations are already made.