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Tournedos of Beef, Madere Sauce
Procure six pieces of round filet four ounces each. Neatly flatten and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper.
Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, place the filets in the pan, one beside another, and cook three minutes on each side. Remove, dress on six freshly prepared round toasts, placed on a hot dish. Pour a Madeira sauce over and serve.
A bare-bones professional formula that assumes you already have a Madeira sauce on the stove and a hot pan in front of you. The success of the dish rests almost entirely on the sear and on the sauce, neither of which the text explains.
- The sauce is the dishSauce Madère is a demi-glace or reduced brown stock finished with Madeira, added off the heat so the wine keeps its aroma. The recipe assumes you have it; make or buy it before the beef goes in the pan, because tournedos wait for nothing.
- What a tournedos isFour-ounce rounds cut from the beef tenderloin; sources differ over whether they are taken from the centre or the narrower end. Ask for filet steaks at that weight rather than slicing a whole tenderloin yourself, unless you want the trimmings.
- "Neatly flatten"This means pressing the round into an even disc with the flat of a knife or a light tap, not pounding it thin. A tournedos that has been beaten out will overcook before it browns.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon of butter in a pan hot enough to sear six steaks will blacken. Use clarified butter, or butter with a neutral oil, and cook in two batches so the pan does not drop temperature and steam the meat.
- Three minutes a sideOn a properly hot pan this will bring a filet of this size to somewhere between medium-rare and medium. Thicker cuts or a crowded pan need longer; go by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock (130F at the centre for medium-rare), and rest the steaks a few minutes before saucing.
- The toastsThese are croûtons in the old sense: rounds of firm white bread cut to the diameter of the steak and fried in butter or toasted, set under each tournedos to catch the sauce and keep the meat off the plate. Cut them before you start cooking.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for roughly a pound and a half of beef, about the standard rate by modern practice and right for a seared crust. Season just before the meat hits the pan.
- YieldSix servings, one tournedos each, as a main course with a vegetable garnish.
Tournedos are cut from the tenderloin, the muscle that made filet the most expensive and least worked beef on the carcass, and the name is generally traced to French kitchen slang — tourne-dos, to turn one's back — with several competing stories about why, none of them documented. The cut seems to belong to the era of the grand hotel and restaurant kitchen, where a brigade could keep demi-glace at the ready and a garde-manger could portion tenderloin all afternoon; Escoffier's repertoire lists dozens of tournedos garnishes, of which Rossini is only the best remembered. Madeira, a fortified wine from the Atlantic islands, was a staple of nineteenth-century brown sauces because it kept indefinitely once opened and gave depth without the sourness of a table wine. The terseness of this entry is telling: the sauce, the croûton and the doneness were all assumed knowledge.