beef Wellington, beef fillet coated in chopped mushrooms and liver pâté and baked inside a puff pastry shell.
Considerable confusion surrounds the origin of beef Wellington. One version that seems more legend than fact attributes it to a cook for the famed duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), the English general who defeated the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Wellington, it is said, liked food that could be eaten on the march, and the dish, with its crusty shell, is certainly portable. Another origin story has the dish simply named in Wellington’s honour, while yet another posits that the beef roast wrapped in pastry resembled a Wellington boot—the original leather kind, not the rubber boot beloved of gardeners today.
Ironically, considering the name, beef Wellington’s true origin would seem to lie in a French dish called filet de boeuf en croûte. To add to the mystery, the first known citation of beef “à la Wellington” dates only to 1903, and the first recipe, from a cookbook written by a chef for Chicago’s Palmer House hotel, appeared in 1940. Beef Wellington became a popular dish in the 1950s and ’60s, largely thanks to the American chef and cookbook author Julia Child’s having included a recipe for the French variation in her best-selling book Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) and then, on a 1965 episode of her television show The French Chef, calling it “filet of Wellington beef.” A favourite dish of U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—a recipe is included in the White House cookbook—beef Wellington became a hallmark of fine dining. Its popularity waned in subsequent decades, although in the early 21st century it enjoyed a modest revival, often cooked in single portions in the manner of the kindred Cornish pasty.
Ingredients vary, but a classic beef Wellington is a tenderloin fillet coated in goose or duck liver pâté and duxelles—which combines chopped mushrooms, shallots, and thyme—that is wrapped in puff pastry and washed in egg and milk to aid in a deep browning of the pastry in the oven. After the dish is cooked at high heat (about 400 °F [200 °C]) for about 25 minutes, the beef emerges rare to medium rare. Some recipes add ham, mustard, and spinach, although the water content of the last can compromise the shell by making it soggy.