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To Cook a Fillet of Beef
After it is trimmed and larded, put it into a small baking pan in the bottom of which are some chopped pieces of pork and beef suet; sprinkle some salt and white pepper over it, and put a large ladleful of hot stock into the bottom of the pan, or it may be basted, simply basted with boiling water. Half an hour (if the oven is very hot, as it should be) before dinner, put it into the oven. Baste it often, supplying a little hot stock if necessary. French cooks often braise a fillet of beef. I do not like it as well as baking or roasting, as the vegetables and wine destroy the beef's own flavor.
This is a whole beef tenderloin roasted fast and hot, with basting standing in for a marinade or sauce. The method still works; only the equipment language and the doneness cues need translating.
- What the cut is"Fillet of beef" here means the whole trimmed tenderloin, roughly 3 to 5 lb once the chain and silverskin are off, not an individual filet steak. Ask for a whole tenderloin, peeled, and tuck and tie the thin tail end so the roast cooks evenly.
- Larding, and whether to botherLarding means threading strips of chilled pork fat through the lean meat with a larding needle, since tenderloin has almost no internal fat. A common modern substitute is to bard instead: wrap the roast in a sheet of caul fat or thin sliced fatback, or simply brush with butter and rely on a short cooking time.
- "Very hot" ovenRead that as roughly 450F, preheated properly. The half hour given assumes a hot oven and a moderate-sized fillet; the fat and suet in the bottom of the pan will also help keep the underside from scorching at that heat.
- The instruction that matters mostCook to temperature, not to the clock. Pull the roast at 120-125F at the thickest point for rare, 130F for medium rare, and rest it 15 minutes before carving. A tenderloin at 450F can move 10 degrees in three or four minutes, so start checking at 20 minutes.
- A ladleful of stockA large ladleful is somewhere between half a cup and a cup. Its job is to keep the pan drippings from burning and to give you something to spoon over the meat, not to stew the beef; keep the liquid shallow or the underside will steam rather than brown.
- Basting with boiling waterThe water must be boiling, as stated, and added hot. Cold liquid in a 450F pan drops the pan temperature and stops the browning that the whole method depends on. Frequent basting is optional if you have barded the roast.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, still sold by butchers and often kept for pastry and puddings. Chopped pork fat, or a few tablespoons of rendered beef fat, does the same work here.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb tenderloin serves 8 to 10. Deglaze the pan with a little more stock for a thin gravy; the recipe itself calls for no sauce, and objects only to wine and vegetables.
The tenderloin's rise as a company roast is generally associated with the later nineteenth century, when improved rail and refrigerated shipping made a single expensive cut worth buying whole for a household dinner. The final lines are a small piece of period argument: braising a fillet with wine and vegetables in the French manner was the fashionable restaurant treatment, and some American domestic writers pushed back against it in favor of plain roasting, arguing that good beef needed nothing added. Larding was standard advice for lean cuts in the era of the coal or wood range, where a long spell in dry heat could ruin them; as ovens grew easier to control and cooking times shortened, the larding needle largely fell out of use.