Mini Beef Wellingtons

Freeze beef briefly for easier slicing. Duxelles must be completely cool and dry before wrapping. Chill assembled Wellingtons before baking for flakier pastry. Internal temperature of 125°F for medium-rare.

Few dishes carry as much historical ambiguity as Beef Wellington. The dish is presumed to be named after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, the Irish-born British general who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, and later served as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Whether the dish was created specifically for him, renamed in his honour after the battle, or simply named for the Wellington boot he popularised is debated — and, as Wikipedia notes, "the precise origin of the name is unclear and the connection between them is unknown." What is documented is a timeline. The earliest known appearance of the name on a menu is a Hamburg-America steamship line menu from a voyage on November 10, 1899. The name appeared again in a Los Angeles Times article in 1903. In their 1914 reference work Le Répertoire de la Cuisine, Gringoire and Saulnier describe serving beef "wellington style" with duxelles and puff pastry. The first published recipe appeared in 1940 in a cookbook produced by the chef of Chicago's Palmer House hotel, nearly 90 years after the Duke of Wellington's death in 1852. Julia Child introduced the dish to a mass American audience by including the French variation in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, and calling it "filet of Wellington beef" on a 1965 episode of The French Chef. The dish subsequently became a hallmark of fine dining in the 1960s and a reported favourite of U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Its close relationship to the classical French filet de bœuf en croûte is acknowledged by most culinary historians — the technique of wrapping a beef fillet in pastry predates any association with the Duke.