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Tournedos of Beef, Chasseur
Trim off a little of the fat from top of a two-pound piece tenderloin of beef, then cut in six equal pieces. Neatly flatten, place on a deep dish with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, a sliced onion, one branch parsley, cut in pieces, one sprig thyme, two bay leaves, one bean crushed garlic, juice of a sound lemon and three tablespoons oil, then let marinade one and a half hours. Drain them. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, add the filets and briskly fry two minutes on each side. Remove and arrange on a dish over six small round, freshly prepared slices of toast. Pour a Chasseur sauce over and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that depends entirely on two things the original leaves unexplained: the sauce, which is assumed to be made separately, and the fact that six pieces cut from two pounds of tenderloin will be thick enough that two minutes a side leaves them rare.
- The sauce comes firstSauce chasseur is not made in this recipe and cannot be improvised in the two minutes the beef takes. It is shallots and sliced mushrooms sweated in butter, deglazed with white wine, finished with tomato and a brown sauce or demi-glace and chopped tarragon and chervil. Have it hot and held before the pan goes on the heat.
- Cutting the tournedosTwo pounds of trimmed tenderloin divided six ways gives pieces of roughly 5 oz, about 1 to 1 1/4 inches thick once "neatly flattened." Flatten with the flat of a knife or a light press, not a mallet; the point is an even round, not a thinned cutlet.
- Two minutes a sideAt that thickness this produces rare to bare medium-rare, which is what tournedos were meant to be. For medium, allow three to four minutes a side and rest them five minutes before saucing.
- A black frying panCast iron or heavy carbon steel, and it needs to be properly hot before the butter goes in. A tablespoon of butter alone will scorch at searing heat; add a little oil with it, or clarified butter.
- Dry the meatThe marinade includes three tablespoons of oil and lemon juice. Drain and blot the filets thoroughly or they will steam rather than brown, and the onion and herb fragments clinging to them will burn.
- One bean crushed garlicOne clove, crushed. 'Bean' here appears to stand for a single clove rather than any measure of weight.
- Salt in the marinadeA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for six pieces is seasoning for the whole batch, applied an hour and a half ahead. Do not salt again before frying.
- The toastCut the rounds to the diameter of the tournedos and fry or toast them at the last moment; croutons left standing go soft under the sauce. The recipe makes six filets on six rounds of toast: six servings.
Tournedos are thick rounds cut from the beef tenderloin, and the name is a nineteenth-century French kitchen word whose origin is uncertain. The chasseur garnish, literally "hunter's," is the classic mushroom-and-shallot-and-white-wine treatment codified in French professional cookery and listed in Escoffier's repertoire; the mushrooms are often said to be the hunting reference, the sauce having traditionally been associated with game cooking before it settled onto beef and chicken. Its appearance in an American book filed under "The World's Kitchen" reflects how thoroughly restaurant French had become the prestige idiom of the hotel dining room, where a cook was expected to have a brown sauce already made and to build the finish onto it in minutes.