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Tournedos of Beef, Imperial
Cut six equal pieces from a well-trimmed two-pound filet of beef, neatly flatten, and season with a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Prepare a Bearnaise sauce and divide in half. Place a gill of tomato sauce in a saucepan and let it reduce to a quarter of the quantity, and mix this tomato in one part of the Bearnaise.
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, lay the filets in one beside another, and briskly fry for three minutes on each side. Dress them on six round bread croutons, of same size as the tournedos, on a large hot dish. With a tablespoon spread the plain Bearnaise sauce on half of the surface of each tournedo, and the Bearnaise with the tomato on other half of same, arrange a very thin slice of truffle on top of each and serve.
A straightforward pan-fried filet dish whose difficulty lies entirely in the sauce work and the plating; everything else is three minutes a side.
- The hinge: two sauces, one béarnaiseMake a single batch of béarnaise, split it, and stir the reduced tomato into one half only. Both must stay lukewarm — too much heat and the emulsion breaks, and a broken béarnaise cannot be rescued once it is on the plate. Hold it in a bowl over warm (not simmering) water and sauce the steaks at the last moment.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Reduced to a quarter it gives you about 2 tablespoons of thick, tomato paste-like sauce, which is stirred into one half of the béarnaise.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper for six steaks — generous but not wrong for filet.
- Cutting the tournedosTwo pounds of trimmed filet in six pieces gives portions of about 5 oz. "Neatly flatten" means pressing them to an even round about an inch thick, not pounding them thin; an even thickness is what makes a single timing work for all six.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing assumes a genuinely hot pan and inch-thick steaks, and lands at medium-rare, around 130F. One tablespoon of butter for six steaks will scorch — use butter with a little oil, or clarified butter, and cook in two batches rather than crowding.
- The croutonsRounds of white bread cut to the diameter of the steaks; croutons of this kind were customarily fried in butter until crisp. Cut them before you cook the beef and drain them well; they exist to absorb juices without going to mush.
- TruffleA thin slice of black truffle on each is decoration. Fresh truffle is a serious expense and jarred truffle contributes little; the dish reads perfectly well without it, and truffle oil is not a substitute here.
- YieldSix servings. Plates must be hot and the food goes out immediately — béarnaise on a cool plate sets and dulls.
Tournedos — small rounds cut from the trimmed center of the beef filet — belong to the vocabulary of nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking, and the name's origin is disputed enough that any confident explanation should be treated as folklore. The pairing here is plain béarnaise on one half of the steak and tomato-tinted béarnaise on the other. The tomato version is the sauce generally known as Choron, named for Alexandre Étienne Choron, a Parisian chef of the later 1800s, and béarnaise itself is traditionally traced to the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s. Splitting a single steak between two sauces for visual effect, and crowning it with a disc of truffle, is exactly the grammar of the grand hotel dining room; the "Imperial" in the title signals the presentation rather than any distinct cooking method.