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Sauce Bercy
Finely chop four sound shallots; place them in a small saucepan with a teaspoon butter and lightly brown for ten minutes, stirring once in a while; then pour in a half gill white wine, let reduce to one-half the quantity, add one and a half gills demi-glace and half teaspoon of chopped chives. Mix a little and let boil for ten minutes, add half ounce good butter, lightly mix and use as required.
A classic French compound sauce built on demi-glace, written for a kitchen that already had a stockpot going. The measurements are in gills, and the whole thing hinges on the quality of the base.
- GillsA US gill is 4 fl oz, so a half gill of wine is 2 fl oz (¼ cup) and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 6 fl oz (¾ cup). If the book is being read against British measure, a gill is 5 fl oz and the quantities scale up by a quarter; either reading works, as the ratio is what matters.
- Demi-glaceThe sauce is only as good as this. Traditional demi-glace is brown stock reduced with espagnole; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a strongly reduced veal stock will stand in. Thin canned brown gravy will not, and the sauce will taste of nothing but shallot.
- "Lightly brown for ten minutes"Read this as a gentle sweat over low heat. Shallots in a teaspoon of butter for ten minutes over anything brisk will scorch, and burnt shallot turns the finished sauce bitter. You want them soft and pale gold.
- The finishing butterThe half ounce (about 1 tablespoon) of butter goes in off the heat, swirled or whisked in cold. Boiling after it is added breaks the emulsion and the sauce goes greasy rather than glossy.
- Reducing the wineUse a dry white with real acidity. Reducing by half is not just concentration; it cooks off the raw alcohol, and skipping it leaves a harsh edge that the demi-glace cannot cover.
- ChivesHalf a teaspoon chopped, added early, is modest by modern taste. Chives lose their perfume in a ten-minute boil, so you may prefer to hold back part of them and add them at the end with the butter.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is given, presumably because the demi-glace was expected to be seasoned already. Taste after the reduction, not before, since reducing concentrates whatever salt is there.
- Yield and useSomewhat under ¾ cup after the boiling, a small sauce for a couple of servings. This brown-sauce version belongs with grilled beef, entrecôte or kidneys; the white-wine-and-fish-velouté sauce of the same name is a different preparation.
Bercy was the wine quarter of eastern Paris, a walled entrepôt on the Seine where barrels arrived by river and were traded outside the city's excise wall; sauces and garnishes carrying the name are generally understood in the classical repertoire to involve white wine and shallots, a nod to that trade. Two sauces share the title and are constantly confused: a fish Bercy, built on fish velouté and the cooking liquor, and this meat version on demi-glace, which in some kitchens was also served with poached beef marrow over grilled steak. The form of the recipe reflects how far the French mother-sauce vocabulary had been absorbed by hotel and restaurant cooking, where demi-glace was kept on hand and a sauce like this was ten minutes' work rather than a project.