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Filet of Beef, Larded, Bercy
Have a filet of beef prepared and finished. Remove all the fat from the gravy of the filet; set the pan on the fire with contents; add half gill claret, half gill of tomato sauce and half gill demi-glace. Mix well with a wooden spoon and let slowly cook for five minutes. Finely chop up one small onion and lightly brown it in a saucepan with half teaspoon melted butter for two minutes. Then strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer into this butter; lightly mix and boil for two minutes. After the filet has been dressed on the hot dish pour the sauce over and serve.
This is a pan-sauce finish for an already-roasted larded tenderloin, so the whole entry hangs on having good roasting-pan drippings and a decent demi-glace in reserve.
- GillsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so each "half gill" is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). The three additions come to about three-quarters of a cup, plus whatever gravy is already in the pan — enough to nap a filet, not to pool on the plate.
- "Prepared and finished"The recipe assumes the filet is already roasted and resting, with its pan and drippings still hot. Pull a whole center-cut tenderloin at 125-130F internal for rare to medium-rare, rest it 15 minutes, and build the sauce in the roasting pan while it rests.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of chilled pork back fat through the lean meat with a larding needle. Back fat is a special order now; wrapping the filet in thin sheets of fatback or blanched bacon and tying it (properly barding, not larding) is the practical stand-in, and is removed before carving.
- ClaretNineteenth-century English and American usage for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red will do; avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked, since the quantity is small and reduces fast.
- Demi-glaceReal demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock, not a bouillon cube dissolved in water. Good frozen or jarred demi-glace from a butcher is the practical substitute; a thin stock will leave the sauce watery, as there is no flour or butter mount here to carry it.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve works. The point is to leave the roasting-pan sediment and any fat behind so only clean sauce meets the browned onion.
- The order of operationsNote that the onion is browned separately and the strained sauce poured onto it, then boiled two minutes. That final short boil is all the cooking the onion gets, so chop it very fine or it will stay crunchy. Classical Bercy uses shallot, which is milder and more in keeping.
- Skim first"Remove all the fat from the gravy" is the step people skip. Beef roasting fat will not emulsify into a sauce this lean and will separate into a slick on the plate.
- YieldA 2 to 2 1/2 lb center-cut filet serves six. The recipe gives no yield, and this quantity of sauce is scant for that many plates.
Sauces called Bercy take their name from the Bercy quarter on the eastern edge of Paris, which for most of the nineteenth century held the city's great wine entrepôt — barrels arrived by river and were stored and taxed there before entering Paris proper. The name is generally traced to that association with wine, and the classical Bercy is a shallot-and-wine reduction finished with meat glaze or butter. What appears here is the red-wine version for beef, with tomato added in the manner of the grand-hotel kitchens of the period, where a tomato sauce and a demi-glace stood ready on the stove all service and could be combined into a dozen named derivatives in minutes. The recipe's brevity is the tell: it is written for a cook who already has the mother sauces made and only needs to be told the proportions.}