![]() A whole beef Wellington | |
Course | Main |
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Place of origin | England |
Serving temperature | Hot |
Main ingredients | Beef, shortcrust pastry, duxelles |
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Steak |
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Beef Wellington is a baked steak dish of English origin, made out of fillet steak and duxelles wrapped in shortcrust pastry. Some recipes include wrapping the contents in prosciutto, or dry-cured ham, which helps retain moisture while preventing the pastry from becoming soggy; use of puff pastry; [1] and/or coating the beef in mustard. Classical recipes may include pâté. [2]
A whole tenderloin may be wrapped and baked, and then sliced for serving, or the tenderloin may be sliced into individual portions before wrapping and baking. [3]
While historians generally believe that the dish is named after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, the precise origin of the name is unclear and no definite connection between the dish and the duke has been found. [4]
Leah Hyslop, writing in The Daily Telegraph , observed that by the time Wellington became famous, meat baked in pastry was a well-established part of English cuisine, and that the dish's similarity to the French filet de bœuf en croûte (fillet of beef in pastry) might imply that "beef Wellington" was a "timely patriotic rebranding of a trendy continental dish". [5] However, she cautioned, there are no 19th-century recipes for the dish. There is a mention of "fillet of beef, à la Wellington" in the Los Angeles Times of 1903, and an 1899 reference in a menu from the Hamburg-America line. [6]
In the Polish classic cookbook, finished in 1909 and published for the first time in 1910, by Maria Ochorowicz-Monatowa (1866-1925), Uniwersalna książka kucharska ("The Universal Cooking Book"), there is a recipe for "Polędwica wołowa à la Wellington" (beef fillet à la Wellington). The recipe does not differ from the dish later known under this name. It is a beef filet enveloped together with duxelles in puff pastry, baked, and served with a truffle or Madeira sauce. The author, who mastered her cooking skills both in Paris and Vienna at the end of the 19th century, claimed that she had received this recipe from the cook of the imperial court in Vienna. She also included "filet à la Wellington" in the menus proposed for the "exquisite dinners". [7] [8]
In Le Répertoire de la Cuisine a professional reference cookbook published by Théodore Gringoire and Louis Saulnier in 1914, there is mentioned a garnish "Wellington" to beef, described as: "Fillet browned in butter and in the oven, coated in poultry stuffing with dry duxelles added, placed in rolled-out puff pastry. Cooked in the oven. Garnished with peeled tomatoes, lettuce, Pommes château".
An installment of a serialized story entitled "Custom Built" by Sidney Herschel Small in 1930 had two of its characters in a restaurant in Los Angeles that had "beef Wellington" on its menu. [9] The first occurrence of the dish recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is a quotation from a 1939 New York food guide with "Tenderloin of Beef Wellington" which is cooked, left to cool, and rolled in a pie crust. [5]
In the Food Network show Good Eats , Alton Brown discusses a variant using the cheaper pork tenderloin instead of beef. [10] A common vegetarian variation of the dish, known as "beet Wellington", replaces the beef with beetroot and has been featured on food competition shows such as MasterChef Australia . [11] [12]
A beefsteak, often called just steak, is a flat cut of beef with parallel faces, usually cut perpendicular to the muscle fibers. In common restaurant service a single serving has a raw mass ranging from 120 to 600 grams. Beef steaks are usually grilled, pan-fried, or broiled. The more tender cuts from the loin and rib are cooked quickly, using dry heat, and served whole. Less tender cuts from the chuck or round are cooked with moist heat or are mechanically tenderized.
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit, nuts, fruit preserves, brown sugar, sweetened vegetables, or with thicker fillings based on eggs and dairy. Savoury pies may be filled with meat, eggs and cheese or a mixture of meat and vegetables.
The T-bone and porterhouse are steaks of beef cut from the short loin. Both steaks include a T-shaped lumbar vertebra with sections of abdominal internal oblique muscle on each side. Porterhouse steaks are cut from the rear end of the short loin and thus include more tenderloin steak, along with a large strip steak. T-bone steaks are cut closer to the front, and contain a smaller section of tenderloin. The smaller portion of a T-bone, when sold alone, is known as a filet mignon, especially if cut from the small forward end of the tenderloin.
Chateaubriand is a dish that traditionally consists of a large front cut fillet of tenderloin grilled between two lesser pieces of meat that are discarded after cooking. While the term originally referred to the preparation of the dish, Auguste Escoffier named the specific front cut of the tenderloin the Chateaubriand.
A profiterole, chou à la crème, also known alternatively as a cream puff (US), is a filled French choux pastry ball with a typically sweet and moist filling of whipped cream, custard, pastry cream, or ice cream. The puffs may be embellished or left plain or garnished with chocolate sauce, caramel, or a dusting of powdered sugar.
A beef tenderloin, known as an eye fillet in Australasia, nautalund in Iceland, filetto in Italy, filet in France, filet mignon in Brazil, and fillet in the United Kingdom and South Africa, is cut from the loin of beef.
Filet mignon is a cut of meat taken from the smaller end of the tenderloin, or psoas major of a cow. In French, it mostly refers to cuts of pork tenderloin.
The strip steak is a cut of beef steaks from the short loin of a steer. It consists of a muscle that does little work, the longissimus, making the meat particularly tender, although not as tender as the nearby psoas major or tenderloin. Unlike the tenderloin, the longissimus is a sizable muscle, allowing it to be cut into larger portions.
During butchering, beef is first divided into primal cuts, pieces of meat initially separated from the carcass. These are basic sections from which steaks and other subdivisions are cut. Since the animal's legs and neck muscles do the most work, they are the toughest; the meat becomes more tender as distance from hoof and horn increases.
Sorrel soup is made from water or broth, sorrel leaves, and salt. Varieties of the same soup include spinach, garden orache, chard, nettle, and occasionally dandelion, goutweed or ramsons, together with or instead of sorrel. It is known in Ashkenazi Jewish, Belarusian, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Armenian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian cuisines. Its other English names, spelled variously schav, shchav, shav, or shtshav, are borrowed from the Yiddish language, which in turn derives from Slavic languages, like for example Belarusian шчаўе, Russian and Ukrainian щавель, shchavel, Polish szczaw. The soup name comes ultimately from the Proto-Slavic ščаvĭ for sorrel. Due to its commonness as a soup in Eastern European cuisines, it is often called green borscht, as a cousin of the standard, reddish-purple beetroot borscht. In Russia, where shchi has been the staple soup, sorrel soup is also called green shchi. In old Russian cookbooks it was called simply green soup.
Pork tenderloin, also called pork fillet, pork steak or Gentleman's Cut, is a long, thin cut of pork.
Breaded cutlet or braised cutlet is a dish made from coating a cutlet of meat with breading or batter and either frying or baking it.
Sautéed mushrooms is a dish prepared by sautéing edible mushrooms. It is served as a side dish, used as an ingredient in dishes such as coq au vin, beef bourguignon, and foods such as duxelles, as a topping for steaks and toast, and also as a garnish.
The shooter's sandwich is a steak sandwich consisting of cooked steak and mushrooms placed inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread and then weighted down. This popular English sandwich is likened to beef Wellington using bread rather than pastry.
Greek-style fish is a dish known in Poland possibly based on Greek Psari Plaki, served hot or cold, which is prepared from fried pieces or fillets of fish in vegetable sauce. Basic sauce ingredients are grated carrots, parsley root, celery, onion as well as tomato concentrate. All of them are fried in oil and then braised with water, salt, pepper and spices. After frying, fish is shortly braised with previously stewed vegetables.
In cuisine, a medallion is a relatively small, circular slice of meat from a fillet. It is preferably cut from the middle of the fillet so that the slice has a round shape.