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Tournedos, Sauce Finnoise
Cut a well-trimmed, two-pound filet of beef in six even filets and season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, arrange filets one beside another in pan and fry for three minutes on each side. Remove, dress on six round-shaped pieces of toast placed on a hot dish, pour a Finnoise sauce over them and serve.
A short, confident restaurant recipe that assumes you already have the sauce made and a very hot pan. Both assumptions are worth taking seriously.
- Make the sauce firstThe recipe gives no timing for the Finnoise because Filippini expected it to be sitting ready on the stove. Tournedos cooked to rare will be cold before a sauce comes together, so have it finished and warm before the beef goes into the pan.
- Cutting the filetTwo pounds of trimmed tenderloin divided six ways gives roughly 5 oz medallions, about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches thick. Cut from the centre of the fillet so the rounds are even; tie each with string if the meat wants to slump.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing produces rare to medium-rare on a medallion of this thickness, which is what was intended. An instant-read thermometer at 125-130F in the centre is more reliable than the clock, since pan and thickness vary.
- More fat, hotter panOne tablespoon of butter for six filets is scant and butter alone will blacken at searing heat. Use butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarified butter, and get the pan genuinely hot before the meat goes in.
- Do not crowd"One beside another" works in a wide restaurant sauté pan. In a domestic 10-inch skillet six medallions will steam rather than brown; cook in two batches and keep the first warm.
- The croûtesCut rounds of firm white bread the same diameter as the filets. Toasting is what the text says, though frying the rounds in butter until crisp is common in classical practice and holds up better under sauce.
- Rest, then sauceGive the meat two or three minutes off the heat before plating, and pour the sauce over at the table's edge rather than early, or the toast softens.
- YieldSix tournedos, one per person as a main course with a vegetable, or six portions of a meat course in a longer menu.
Tournedos are small rounds cut from the heart of the beef fillet, a cut that came into its own in nineteenth-century French restaurant cooking, where the fillet was expensive enough to be portioned precisely and cooked to order. The croûte beneath is not decoration: it keeps the medallion off the plate and absorbs the juices, though many classical tournedos are set instead on artichoke bottoms or potato cakes, or served with no base at all. A "sauce finnoise" is one of the many nineteenth-century sauces named for a country rather than a person or place of invention; its exact composition is not reliably attested, and Filippini would have expected the reader to turn to the sauce chapter of the same book for it. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its brevity here is characteristic: the writing is aimed at cooks who already work in a kitchen where stocks and mother sauces are standing ready, and who need only the assembly.