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Fillet of Beef, Mignonne
(Paris.) Broil a fine fillet of beef, dusting it first with salt, pepper, onion juice, and olive oil. When brown, pour around a sauce made of 1/2 cup of cream whipped stiff, with 2 tablespoonfuls of grated horse-radish, pepper, and salt. Garnish with sliced and fried bananas.
A hot broiled fillet under a cold whipped horseradish cream, with fried bananas alongside — a plated dish that assumes a cook working to order rather than in advance. Timing is everything, since the sauce collapses if it waits.
- The hinge: build the sauce lastWhipped cream folded with horseradish holds perhaps twenty minutes before it weeps and turns to horseradish soup. Whip it while the beef rests, and spoon it around the meat at the moment of serving, never over the top where the heat will melt it.
- What cut to buy"Fillet of beef" here is the whole beef tenderloin or a large centre-cut piece of it, not individual steaks. A 2 to 2 1/2 lb trimmed centre cut, tied, feeds six and carves neatly; individual filets mignons also work but shorten the cooking sharply.
- Broiling, then and nowA period broiler meant a rack over or under live coals at a fierce heat. Use the oven broiler at its highest setting with the meat 4 to 5 inches from the element, or sear on a grill and finish in a 425F oven. Pull the beef at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare and rest it 10 minutes; tenderloin is lean and goes dry and grey past 140F.
- Onion juiceA standard nineteenth-century seasoning, made by halving an onion and pressing it against a grater or in a cloth to extract the liquid without the pulp. A teaspoon or two is enough for a whole fillet. Grating half a small onion into a sieve and pressing gives the same thing in a minute.
- Cream that will whipUse heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent butterfat or above; ultra-pasteurised cream whips but holds less well, which matters in a sauce already loosened by horseradish. Half a cup of cream yields roughly a cup whipped — enough to ring one fillet, not to blanket it.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root is most likely what the recipe means, and it is much hotter and cleaner than the jarred kind. If using prepared horseradish, drain it well in a sieve first, as the vinegar and brine will thin and curdle the cream. Fold it in with a spatula rather than beating it.
- The bananasChoose firm, barely ripe fruit; anything spotted will fall apart. Cut on the diagonal about 1/2 inch thick and fry quickly in clarified butter until golden on both sides, then salt lightly. They are a garnish and a foil for the horseradish, not a dessert element.
- Yield and serviceSix servings from a centre-cut fillet. Carve into thick slices, arrange on a warmed platter, spoon the cream sauce around the base and ring the outside with the bananas.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the American cook abroad, collecting dishes city by city and tagging each with its origin, here simply "(Paris.)". Mignonne is the feminine of mignon, "dainty" or "small" — the same word behind filet mignon, which is often said to name the tapered tail end of the tenderloin rather than the whole muscle. The pairing of beef with grated horseradish beaten into cream is Northern European in origin and reached French restaurant cooking as a garnish rather than a sauce in the classical sense, since it is never cooked. The fried bananas are the surprise, and a period marker: fast steamship traffic had made bananas a familiar fruit in American ports by the 1890s, and their appearance in a savoury course speaks of the same taste for the exotic as pineapple and curry powder.