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Fillet, with Horseradish Sauce
Cut a fillet of beef into slices one and a half inches thick. Brush each slice with melted butter. Then cut white paper in large heart-shaped pieces, fold in center, lengthwise. Put a slice in each paper and fold edges together; place in baking pan, and cook in a hot oven fourteen minutes; serve in papers, having first opened paper. Put a tablespoonful of sauce on each and pass the remaining quantity in sauce boat.
This is beef tenderloin en papillote, an early-1900s presentation trick that survives largely unchanged. Two things need translating: the oven and the paper.
- Oven temperature"A hot oven" in period usage is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F; the book gives no figure. At that heat fourteen minutes for a 1½-inch tenderloin slice in paper should land on the rare to medium-rare side; if you check with an instant-read thermometer, 125-130F, accepting that piercing the parcel breaks the seal.
- The paper"White paper" here means unglazed kitchen or butcher paper. Use parchment. Do not substitute waxed paper, which smokes and softens at this temperature, and do not use printed or recycled paper.
- Folding the papilloteCut a heart roughly twice the width of the steak, fold it in half lengthwise, lay the steak on one half near the crease, then crimp the open edge in a series of small overlapping folds from the top of the heart to the point. Twist or tuck the final fold under so steam cannot escape.
- The hingeThe parcel has to be sealed and the meat reasonably dry before it goes in. A leaking papillote steams nothing and simply bakes the beef, and surface water dilutes the butter and juices in the parcel. Pat the slices dry, then brush with butter.
- Butter quantityThe original gives none. About a teaspoon of melted butter per slice is enough to coat without pooling and soaking the paper.
- The sauceNo sauce recipe is given on this page. Period horseradish sauces take two common forms: grated fresh horseradish folded into whipped or thick cream with a little vinegar, salt and a pinch of sugar, served cold; or the same stirred into a white sauce and served warm. Either would suit here.
- SeasoningThe instructions omit salt and pepper entirely, as many recipes of the era do. Season both faces of each slice before wrapping.
- Yield and servingOne parcel per person; the recipe states no yield. The paper is part of the presentation and the meat is served in it, but note that the recipe has the paper opened first and the spoonful of sauce added before it reaches the diner, with the rest passed in a sauce boat.
Cooking en papillote - in a paper case - was standard restaurant practice in France by the nineteenth century, and its arrival in American household cookbooks reflects how thoroughly turn-of-the-century domestic writing borrowed from professional French kitchens. The heart-shaped cut is probably not mere decorative fussiness: one plausible rationale is that the shape gives you a wide end for the food and a taper to crimp shut, and that the folded crease means the sealed edge runs along a single curve rather than a corner. Fillet of beef, the tenderloin, was expensive and lean, which makes it a natural candidate for the method, since the sealed paper traps what little juice the cut releases instead of letting it run off into a pan. The instruction to "serve in papers, having first opened paper" is a small piece of evidence about how carefully these books coached households in restaurant manners.