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Tournedos of Beef, Sauce Bercy
Cut out from a two-pound piece of tenderloin six even filets. Neatly flatten, lightly trim and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the filets and briskly fry for three minutes on each side, dress on a hot dish with six bread croutons same size as tournedos, pour a Bercy sauce over and serve.
A straight French steak preparation that depends almost entirely on the sauce and on not overcooking the meat. Two pounds of tenderloin cut into six gives filets of roughly 5 oz each, so figure them at about an inch to an inch and a quarter thick.
- The hinge: three minutes a sideOn an inch-thick filet in a properly hot pan, six minutes total will land somewhere between medium-rare and medium; check early if you want it rarer. Tenderloin has no fat or connective tissue to reward longer cooking, so anything past medium turns it dry and mealy.
- Butter alone will burnA tablespoon of butter over the heat needed to sear six steaks will blacken before the crust forms. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and cook in two batches rather than crowding the pan.
- Seasoning quantityA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper across six filets is about right for surfaces only; many cooks season just before the steaks go into the pan on the grounds that standing salt draws moisture to the surface.
- Sauce BercyThe classic version is shallots softened in butter, white wine reduced almost dry, meat glaze or reduced veal stock added, finished with butter, lemon and parsley. Nothing of it is spelled out here, the name being left to stand on its own. The version served with beef often includes poached beef marrow.
- CroutonsThese are rounds of crustless bread cut to the diameter of the tournedos and fried in clarified butter until crisp, one under each steak. They are structural, not decorative: they keep the meat out of the sauce so the crust stays crisp.
- Neatly flattenThis means pressing each filet lightly with the flat of a knife or the heel of the hand to an even thickness, not pounding it thin. Even thickness is what makes a single blanket timing work across six pieces.
- Rest before saucingGive the filets three or four minutes on the hot dish before the sauce goes over, and warm the plates; the recipe's "hot dish" assumes as much.
- YieldSix servings, one tournedos each, as a main course with a vegetable garnish.
The word tournedos is French kitchen slang for steaks cut from the narrow heart of the beef fillet, and the various stories told about its origin — that the dish was passed behind the diners' backs, or that the cuts were turned and set back-to-back on the platter — are traditional rather than documented. What is certain is that by the second half of the nineteenth century the term was fixed in professional French practice, and a tournedos was understood to be a small round filet, seared fast, set on a fried crouton and finished with a named sauce; Rossini is only the most famous of dozens of such garnishes. Bercy takes its name from the district on the eastern edge of Paris that was for centuries the city's wine entrepôt, where wine arriving by river was unloaded, stored and taxed — hence a shallot-and-white-wine reduction bearing the quarter's name. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, wrote for American cooks and hotel kitchens working in the French idiom, which is why the sauce is named rather than described: he expected it to be looked up elsewhere in the book, or simply known.