Professor Wellington, I Presume

Welcome, core peeps! It's New Year's day, and, though still bleary-eyed, I am going to write about food. This--the writing part, that is-- is all thanks to C-Spice and her remarkable baby blog.

But how do you write about food? A baby is a living organism, who grows and changes from moment to moment. Food, on the other hand, is just a category. One meal is replaced by another, in succession. One day you've dedicated yourself to a hamburger; another day it's a beet salad. Apples and oranges. Food doesn't accumulate or remember itself, except around the muffin-top.

And food doesn't speak. If, once upon a time, it had ever mooed or clucked or bleated, such activity will undoubtedly have ceased in the process of its transformation into food.

One could, of course, speak on food's behalf. But if we speak for it, whom does this benefit?
No: a food blog must remain content with taking note of the passing of food itself-- its transformations, its consumption, its digestion.

Which is, let's face it, the best part.

Today, before I forget, I want to dedicate some script to the memory of Arthur Wellesley. Not the Waterloo part, but the beef part.

I'll say this: It's hardly foolproof, but Beef Wellington remains a possibility.

Provided you're looking for a way to blow sixty or seventy bucks on a single dish, the old B.W. is something to consider for a party of non-vegetarians looking to dine on something festive. The trick is cooking it properly. As the (new) Joy tells us, getting the pastry shell crispy and golden without overcooking the tender beef inside is something of a challenge. Last night, that wasn't really the issue, though the meat was far from rare. The problem the other night was instead that I was rushing, and the supermarket had run out of pastry sheets. So I used two 9" round pie sheets, joined in the middle.

I don't recommend this. Not only did the seam not hold, but the pastry barely met in the middle when I wrapped up the beef, and thus the edifice crumbled in a few places. The visuals were compromised. It was still quite a tasty dish, though, and worth trying again. I thought it might be cloying, but with a little bordelaise sauce underneath the slice, and with a nice fruity red to accompany it, it didn't seem over-rich at all. But that's because we had another course to follow, and were sharing a four-pound piece of meat between seven people.

The assembly promises to be the easy part, which it is, provided you either make your own pastry dough or buy the right fricking shape. Here's a quick recitation:

First, there are the duxelles. What a fortuitous discovery-- these little buggers are pretty tasty all on their own. Chop up some mushrooms in the food processor and squeeze them through a kitchen towel; after all the pinkish liquid drains out, you have a big dry bolus of mushroom mulch. This process makes the mushrooms taste more, not less, mushroomy. You then add them to a pan of sautéed shallots in butter, cook for 5-6 minutes, add a little madeira and season, and you've got a delicious mushroomy paste. This might be nice on, say, a sandwich or something. Better yet, you could stuff it under a chicken skin before roasting it, perhaps with some butter to keep it from drying out.

You then mash this mushroomy goodness together with some liver pâté (or, if fortune is smiling, foie gras) and a wee bit more madeira and you've got the traditional filling for Beef Wellington. Or so I gather; this is all from the Joy. I bet truffles would fare well in this mixture as well, or at least a little truffle oil. Something to add a little brightness might also be welcome, but the vinegar in the Bordelaise sauce worked well here, too. Brightness isn't too much of a trouble if you don't overcook the meat.

The big player here is, of course, the beef. The ideal way to proceed here would be to buy only the true tenderloin itself, the heart of the cut. But the tenderloin I bought wasn't from a butcher, as I would have preferred. Instead it came in a sealed fridge-pack that looked like a little football. It was a center cut piece, which ended up having essentially two parts, the inner and the outer, with the outer part slightly more fibrous than the inner. But both were fine-- both pieces went into the pie, laid end to end. But I would imagine that the true tenderloin would have the finer texture.

Having admired the $44 cut of beef-- its fat, gristle, and silver skin lovingly removed with a sharp (or sharp-ish) knife-- you sear it VERY briefly in a hot pan (having brought a mix of butter and oil to the smoking point). When it cools, you spread out some pastry dough wide enough to wrap around the tenderloin (this requires foresight), spread a layer of the duxelles-pâté mixture under and around the beef, and wrap the whole thing up.

Again, here's where things went a little wobbly last night: the pastry didn't cover the meat fully enough, and it felt like wrapping a present with too small a piece of wrapping paper. So the dough got a little stretched. Also, the outer piece of the loin had a tendency to flap open like a butterfly, and as that gap opened up, it pulled against the dough and caused problems. So in the future, I would a) get the right piece of beef, and b) get the right piece of pastry dough.
So even though I'd vented the pastry, it created its own natural vents as well.

I cooked it for about 30-35 minutes in a 400 oven; the dough looked close to being golden, but by then the meat was well on its way-- already 120 when I checked. And since it continues to cook within its pastry shell even after it's left the oven, it should come out by 115 or so. I think an oven temperature of 425 for a shorter period of time would work better, at least for a smallish loin piece.

A well-constructed Beef Wellington, with pastry decorations and the like, would look marvelous on the table, a Spanish galleon brimming with treasure. And since the meat is really tender, it would be easy to carve. But I served up this sloppy mess in the kitchen, adding sauce to the plate and chopped parsley to the top, in order to spruce things up as much as possible. It really was quite tasty, especially since we didn't eat too much of it. Counter-intuitively, I might suggest this as an opening course, much like beef cheeks-- rich, but served in small portions.
We then had boiled lobsters (served out of the shell) and a lovely mâche salad made by A., the salad master.

This meal, incidentally, will cause you to gain over four pounds in one evening. It did for me.