Home › Meats › To Roast a Fillet of Beef
To Roast a Fillet of Beef
Lard it, cover the fillet with sweet salad-oil and a little lemon juice. Do not place it in too hot an oven at first, as it would scorch the larding. Baste it frequently. A professional cook would glaze the fillet two or three times with a glazing brush, beginning the first time about seven minutes before taking it away from the fire, then glazing it again when it is on the dish to be served.
Glaze is merely strong stock boiled down until it is almost a thick jelly. When the fillet is carved at table, the little juice which falls into the dish, should be poured over the slices.
A whole beef tenderloin roasted plain, with the period's two signature refinements: larding with strips of pork fat, and a final varnish of reduced stock. The book gives neither temperature nor time, so both have to be supplied.
- What the cut isA "fillet" here is the whole beef tenderloin, trimmed of silverskin and chain, usually 4-6 lb untrimmed and 3-4 lb after. Tuck and tie the thin tail end back under itself so the roast is an even thickness.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of chilled pork back fat through the meat with a larding needle, a step that existed because tenderloin has almost no internal fat. Barding — tying a sheet of fatback or caul over the top — does the same job with less equipment, and the modern shortcut is simply to sear hard and baste with butter.
- Sweet salad-oilOlive oil; "sweet" distinguished fresh oil from rancid. Any decent olive oil works; the recipe asks only for "a little" lemon juice — a spoonful or so, rubbed over with the oil.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figure. "Not too hot at first" points to a moderate oven; around 325F works, and keeps the exposed pork fat from blackening. If you have not larded, the reverse works better: sear the outside in a hot pan, then roast at 275-300F.
- DonenessIgnore time and use a thermometer in the thickest part. Pull at 120-125F for rare, 130F for medium rare; the temperature climbs several degrees while resting. Tenderloin is unforgiving and goes from rose to grey in a matter of minutes.
- BastingFrequent basting mattered with the uneven heat of a period range or open fire — the recipe speaks of taking the fillet "away from the fire." In a modern oven, opening the door every few minutes costs more heat than the basting gains — three or four times over the roast is plenty.
- The glazeThis is glace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sheets and sets to a firm jelly when cold. A quart of good stock yields a few tablespoons. Warm it to brushing consistency and apply in the last minutes, as the recipe says, since it scorches if it goes on early.
- Resting and servingRest the roast 15-20 minutes, loosely tented, before carving. A 3-4 lb trimmed tenderloin serves eight to ten; the juices that pool in the platter are the whole sauce, so warm the platter and do not pour them off.
Roast fillet of beef was long a standard "handsome" joint for company: expensive, quick to cook, easy to carve into neat rounds, and mild enough to carry whatever sauce the cook chose. The two techniques in this short entry, larding and glazing, both come out of French professional practice; the author's aside about what "a professional cook would" do is an admission that the reader is being shown a restaurant method scaled down. Glace de viande, the boiled-down stock described here, was the working kitchen's concentrate long before commercial bouillon cubes and pastes made it optional. The insistence on catching the carving juices and returning them to the slices is a reminder that this cut, then as now, produces very little of its own gravy.