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Sole à la Bercy
Skin and bone two large flounders, and cut into eight fillets. Put into a buttered pan, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and add one-fourth cup white wine. Cover and cook fifteen minutes. Remove to serving dish, pour over Bercy Sauce, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. Bercy Sauce. Fry one tablespoon finely chopped shallot in one tablespoon butter five minutes; add two tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually the liquor left in pan with enough White Stock to make one cup. Add two tablespoons butter, and salt and cayenne to taste.
A simple French-style baked fillet with a shallot-and-wine pan sauce. The one thing worth changing is the cooking time.
- Cook it far lessFifteen minutes will take thin flounder fillets well past done and leave them dry and chalky. Skinned fillets of a quarter to half an inch cook in 8 to 10 minutes in a covered dish; pull them at 140-145F, when the flesh has just turned opaque and separates under gentle pressure.
- The oven temperatureThe book gives none, and the recipe says only "cook" in a covered pan, which could mean stovetop as readily as oven. If you do bake it, a moderate oven of 350-375F suits a covered dish of fillets. Lower and the fish steams in its own juice without concentrating the pan liquor.
- Two large floundersWhole flounder yields roughly a third to a little under half its weight in skinless fillets, so two large fish give somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 lb of usable fish. Buying about 1 1/2 lb of ready-cut flounder, sole, plaice or any thin white flatfish fillet does the same job, and the recipe's "sole" is a courtesy title; true Dover sole was rarely if ever to be had on American markets at the time.
- White stockThe book's white stock is an unbrowned veal or veal-and-chicken stock. Unsalted chicken stock stands in cleanly; a light fish stock is even better here, since the pan liquor is already fish. Avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- Mounting the butterThe final two tablespoons of butter go in off the heat, whisked in a piece at a time. Boiled back into the sauce it splits and the sauce goes greasy rather than glossy.
- Shallot and its fryingFive minutes in butter is meant to soften the shallot without colour. Keep the heat low; browned shallot turns the sauce sharp and speckled, which is not the point of a Bercy.
- CayenneCayenne is used as a seasoning, not a heat source. A pinch on the tip of a knife, tasted and repeated if needed.
- YieldEight fillets serve four as a main course, or six at a longer meal. The sauce quantity, one cup, is generous for four.
Bercy takes its name from the riverside quarter on the eastern edge of Paris that was for most of the nineteenth century the city's wine entrep icht, where barrels came up the Seine and were stored, taxed and traded. Dishes labelled \\ la Bercy are accordingly built on white wine and shallots, whether as a compound butter for grilled meat or, as here, a shallot-wine sauce thickened with roux and finished with butter. Its inclusion here reflects the standing of French restaurant cookery in American cooking schools around 1900, and the book sets out a range of named sauces alongside one another; what pupils were actually expected to do with them is not something the text records. The casual use of "sole" for flounder is of its period too and and menued under the French name, a habit that persists in fish counters today.