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Tenderloin with Spices
(Filetto alla piemontese) Clean and trim the meat, removing all the little skins. Then sprinkle with nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and pepper, and place in an earthen vase covered, together with a bunch of aromatic herbs, sage, parsley, rosemary, onion, carrot and celery, all chopped fine. After a few hours melt and brown a piece of butter with the aromatic herbs, then remove the latter and place the tenderloin, leaving it to simmer for half an hour, pricking it often with a large fork or a larding pin, to add its juice to the gravy. Serve hot, 159
A stovetop-braised beef tenderloin from the Piedmontese repertoire, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the dish. Almost nothing is quantified, and the one instruction most worth ignoring is the one the original repeats.
- Do not prick the meatThe recipe tells you to puncture the tenderloin repeatedly so its juices run into the pan. That is exactly how you end up with dry beef and a thin gravy. If you want more body in the sauce, deglaze with a splash of wine or stock at the end instead.
- Half an hour is too longHalf an hour of simmering will take a whole tenderloin well past grey. A trimmed center-cut piece of about 2 lb wants roughly 20 to 25 minutes total in a covered pan over low heat, pulled at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare, then rested 10 minutes.
- "An earthen vase"A glazed ceramic or glass bowl. It is simply a non-reactive marinating vessel; the spices and aromatics sit on the meat, dry, with no liquid. Cover and refrigerate rather than leaving it out for the "few hours" the original assumes.
- "A piece of butter"Read this as 3 to 4 tablespoons in a heavy pan just wide enough to hold the meat. Adding a spoonful of oil raises the smoke point and keeps the milk solids from blackening while you brown the beef.
- Why the herbs come outWhy the herbs may come out -- Finely chopped onion, carrot, celery and soft herbs can scorch at searing heat and turn the butter bitter; browning them first perfumes the fat, and lifting them out before the meat goes in keeps that flavor clean. The original does not say to return them; if you want them in the gravy, add them back once the beef is seared and the heat is down.
- The spicingNutmeg, cinnamon, salt and pepper on beef reads oddly now but is deliberate here. Use a light hand -- a scant quarter teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon for a 2 lb fillet is plenty to register as warmth rather than dessert.
- Yield and servingA 2 lb trimmed tenderloin serves four to six. Slice across the grain, spoon the buttery vegetable gravy over, and serve with something plain -- boiled potatoes or polenta -- since the sauce is intensely aromatic.
- The trailing numberThe "159" at the end is not part of the method; it is most likely a page or entry number in the book from which the recipe comes.
Filetto alla piemontese belongs to the Piedmontese kitchen's long conversation with France: Turin was the seat of the House of Savoy, whose court cooking sat squarely between the two traditions, and the technique here -- a dry spice cure, a battuto of onion, carrot and celery sweated in butter, a covered braise -- is closer to the French manner than to the olive-oil cooking of the south. Butter rather than oil is itself the northern signature. The nutmeg and cinnamon are older still, a survival of the medieval and Renaissance Italian habit of sweet-spicing roast meat, which persisted in regional cookery well after it faded from fashionable French tables. The recipe as it comes down to us is compressed to the point of terseness -- quantities were assumed to live in the cook's hands, not on the page.