Tournedos Coligny

Tournedos Coligny (butter-seared beef fillet on sweet-potato galettes with chow-chow in sauce Provençale) teaches service before searing. The one true thing is this: the lean fillet must be the last thing into the pan. Its crust and rosy centre cannot wait while you shape potatoes or coax a sauce into gloss, so every galette and every spoonful of paysanne must be ready first.

The original kitchen assumed a saucier on staff with sauce Provençale ready, a stockpot never off the fire behind the sauce station, a cook shaping sweet-potato rounds, and a salamander's fierce finishing heat. At home, use the cross-referenced preparation as the book intends, a ring cutter the width of the beef, a hot oven with a brief broiler finish, and one skillet. The separate stations are brigade scaffolding and can go; the equal measure of chow-chow and sauce, the egg-gilded galettes, the butter sear, and the crown arrangement are the dish and must stay. Here the crown is scaled to four without changing those proportions. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Chow-chow here is chayote, cut paysanne (thick triangular slices), parboiled, then stewed in butter before it meets an equal quantity of sauce Provençale. If the garnish loosens the sauce, lift out the chayote and reduce the sauce alone; ça se rattrape. Before the beef touches the pan, have the galettes browning, the paysanne gently held, and the serving platter warm. That choreography decides Tournedos Coligny.