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Tournedos of Beef with Olives
Cut two pounds well-trimmed filet of beef in six even pieces, lightly flatten, and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, place filets one beside another in pan, and briskly fry three minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish, pour an olive sauce and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A bare-bones tournedos recipe that assumes you already have a sauce ready and a hot pan. Two details decide the outcome: the pan must be genuinely hot, and the olive sauce is a separate job to be finished before the beef goes in.
- The olive sauce comes firstThe recipe gives no sauce method at all; an olive sauce of the period is a brown sauce or demi-glace with stoned, blanched green olives added at the end. Have it hot and ready, since six tournedos cook in six minutes and will not wait.
- What a tournedos isRounds cut across the centre of the beef tenderloin; six pieces from two pounds of trimmed filet come to about five ounces each, roughly an inch or so thick depending on the diameter of the meat. "Lightly flatten" means a gentle press to even the thickness, not pounding it thin.
- More fat than one tablespoonA single tablespoon of butter in a pan holding six steaks will burn and leave dry patches. Use butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarified butter, and add more if the pan looks dry when you turn them.
- Two pans, or two batchesSix steaks "one beside another" need a large, wide skillet. Crowded meat steams instead of browning; cook in two batches and keep the first warm rather than crushing them together.
- Three minutes a side means rareOn a properly hot pan that gives medium-rare to rare in the centre, which is what the dish intends. If you want a firmer result, work to internal temperature instead: 130F for medium-rare, 140F for medium.
- Rest before saucingGive the steaks five minutes on the warm serving dish before the sauce goes over, or the juices will run out and thin it. The original's instruction to "dress on a dish" then pour the sauce over conveniently allows for this.
- YieldSix pieces, six servings by the standards of a long menu; three to four if the tournedos are the centre of the meal.
Tournedos took their name in nineteenth-century French professional kitchens, and the origin is usually given as slang rather than record — the neat rounds cut from the tenderloin's middle turned out on plates in a way that supposedly earned the name. Cookbooks of this era treat the cut as a blank canvas: the meat is typically seasoned, seared briefly in butter and named for whatever garnish or sauce arrives with it, which is why the instructions here are so short and the sauce is not described at all. Olives with brown sauce belong to the Provençal and Italian side of that repertoire, where the salt and bitterness of green olives were used to cut rich reduced stock.