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Tournedos of Beef with Marrow
Procure six small tournedos (filets) three-quarters of an inch thick and two inches in diameter; place them on a plate, season well all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat in a black frying pan two tablespoons melted butter or lard, add the tournedos, one beside another, and fry for three minutes on each side.
Prepare six round toasts of the size of the tournedos and place them on a hot dish. Dress the tournedos on the toasts. Arrange two small pieces boiled marrow on top of each filet, pour a hot Madeira sauce, around the tournedos and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that lives or dies on the sear and on getting decent marrow. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: dry meat, hot panThree minutes a side only works if the filets go in dry and the fat is shimmering. Pat them with paper towel after salting, and give the pan a full two or three minutes over medium-high heat before the beef touches it.
- "Black frying pan"This means a cast-iron or heavy steel skillet, blackened by use. Any heavy pan that holds heat will do; a thin nonstick pan will steam the tournedos rather than brown them.
- The cutTournedos are rounds cut from the beef tenderloin, usually from the narrower portion rather than the thick head. Ask the butcher for six medallions about 3/4 inch thick and 2 inches across, or slice them yourself from a trimmed tenderloin.
- DonenessThree minutes a side in a well-heated pan may take a piece this thin past medium-rare, so treat the timing as a starting point rather than a rule. Check one with an instant-read thermometer rather than trusting the clock, since pan and stove vary more than the recipe admits.
- MarrowOrder beef marrow bones cut lengthwise or in 2-inch lengths and push the marrow out, or ask for it loose. Soak it in cold salted water an hour or two to draw out blood, then poach in barely simmering salted water for 5 to 10 minutes until just translucent and set. Boiling hard melts it away.
- Madeira sauceThe book assumes you have a brown sauce on hand. In a modern kitchen: pour off the frying fat, deglaze the pan with a generous splash of dry Madeira, add a cup of strong beef stock, reduce until it coats a spoon, then whisk in cold butter off the heat.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper for six small filets is about right if it is table salt; with coarse kosher salt use closer to a rounded teaspoon and a half.
- The toastsCut rounds from firm white bread with a 2-inch cutter and fry them in butter rather than toasting dry. They exist to absorb the sauce, and dry toast turns to paper under it.
- YieldSix tournedos, so six servings as a course or three as a main plate. Have the toasts and marrow ready before the beef goes in the pan; the whole thing must reach the table hot.
The tournedos is a French restaurant cut, generally traced to the mid-nineteenth-century Paris kitchens where the tenderloin was portioned into individual medallions for a la carte service, and the name is most often explained, in what is really a folk etymology rather than documented fact, as coming from tourner le dos, to turn the back. Poached beef marrow as a garnish belongs to the same tradition and was once entirely ordinary: marrow bones were cheap, and the soft, rich marrow served the same function that a spoonful of compound butter does now. Its appearance in an early twentieth-century American "international" collection is a sign of how thoroughly hotel-French cooking had become the aspirational standard for English-speaking households, complete with Madeira sauce and croutes of fried bread. The marrow largely vanished from home cooking as butchers stopped selling bones by default, and returned only recently by way of restaurants roasting them split and served with toast.