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As an EYB evangelist, I share the desire to come up with the goods for your mother-in-law.

Something that struck me in looking at your Bookshelf is that a high proportion of the unindexed titles are specialized in ways that enable them to be ruled out as candidates for a seared tenderloin with tomato and anchovy sauce recipe (vegetarian, salads, drinks, burgers, cheese, seafood, Asian, etc.)

Of the 56 unindexed books, only 8 to a dozen seem real possibilities.  In descending order of likelihood, they are:

   United States of America: World Cuisine - Jean-Georges Vongerichten

   Mansion on Turtle Creek - Dean Fearing

   This Is Delicious! What Is it?

   Best of De Gustibus - Marion Burros

   Four Season Cookbook

   The Mangia Cookbook

   World Cusine Morocco

   Food & Wine Mag. Quick from Scratch One-Dish

Less likely, but possible:

   Fresh & Light

   Jim Fobel Diet Feasts

   Creative Cooking without Wheat, Milk, & Eggs

So EYB's "armchair analysis" lets you *greatly* reduce the search! 

[My money's on one of the first three, but maybe that's just because they're what I'd be most drawn to if I were poking around your shelf.]

Let us know if it does turn out to be one of the books above!

I like the way you think, Ellabee! My money would be on the third book - anchovy being an all-time classic for "This is delicious, what is it?" type questions!

anchovy and tomato sounds very Italian to me.  No recipe with that title on Mansion on Turtle Creek. 

Southern Italian? 

Thanks, Rinshin, for eliminating one of the candidates! The fewer books frachel has to pull down, the more credit to EYB. <g>

Tomato-anchovy sauce could also be Spanish -- or Basque. With seared beef tenderloin, though, it seems less tied to a cuisine and more a chef-ly way to add savory depth.  Which is what made the Vongerichten book one of the likelier suspects (to me).

A fun mystery; hope others with one of the probable books can help winnow the list.

Meanwhile, frachel, in the interest of keeping you from doing any more book-lifting than you have to, just wanted to check that EYB search powers have been fully used, so we're sure the recipe's not among your indexed books. 

Forgive me, then, for asking, if you've already done this and it seems obvious: Did you search only on the full recipe title? Or did you also search on (e.g.) anchovy tomato and browse through the results a bit?

I can imagine a situation where the cookbook lists the dish as your mother-in-law wrote it down, say as part of a menu -- but there are actually separate recipes for the beef and the sauce.

Brilliant Breadcrumbs!  We have a group of recipe detectives here.  Now we wait with bated breath to hear from frachel whether that is the correct recipe.  It certainly sounds like it.