Home › The World's Kitchen › Troncons of Mackerel, Bercere
Troncons of Mackerel, Bercere
Cut head and tail off a three-pound fresh Spanish mackerel, trim off fins and cut it into six even, crosswise pieces, season with a teaspoon salt and keep on a plate. Cut the white parts of four leeks into julienne strips, keeping the green parts for soups. Place them in a saucepan with a tablespoon butter, cook for five minutes, then add the fish. Sprinkle two tablespoons flour over all. Moisten with a tablespoon vinegar, teaspoon lemon juice, gill white wine and two gills water. Shuffle a little, cover pan, briskly boil for five minutes, then set in oven for thirty minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish, sprinkle a little parsley over and serve.
A one-pan braise of mackerel steaks in leeks, wine and a little acid. The whole thing hinges on cooking time, which is where the original will lead you astray.
- The timing is the problemFive minutes of brisk boiling plus thirty minutes in the oven will reduce mackerel steaks to dry threads. Cut the fish in only after the leeks are softened and the liquid is hot, then give it 10 to 12 minutes total for pieces from a 3-lb fish; it is done when the flesh parts from the bone at the center.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So: 1/2 cup white wine and 1 cup water, plus the tablespoon of vinegar and teaspoon of lemon juice.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in 1906. A covered pan of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. The oven is only holding a gentle simmer, so the stovetop works equally well over low heat.
- TronçonsTron cons -- The French butchery term for cross-cut steaks from a round fish, bone in. Six pieces from a trimmed three-pound fish gives fairly thick steaks. Ask the fishmonger to cut them if you would rather not saw through the backbone.
- Spanish mackerelMilder and firmer-fleshed than the smaller, oilier Atlantic mackerel. A three-pound Spanish mackerel, king mackerel steaks, or Spanish mackerel fillets folded in half all work; Atlantic mackerel is more likely to fall apart and will taste stronger.
- The flourTwo tablespoons sprinkled over fish and leeks is the thickener for the sauce. Stir it into the leeks and butter for a minute before the liquid goes in, or you will get lumps that no amount of shuffling the pan will disperse.
- "Shuffle a little"Slide the pan back and forth on the burner rather than stirring, which would break up the steaks. The same instinct applies when you serve: lift the pieces out with a wide spatula.
- YieldSix steaks, so six servings as a course or four as a main dish. Boiled or steamed potatoes are the obvious partner for the leek sauce.
The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like a professional's notebook: hundreds of short entries, French terms left untranslated, quantities pared to the bone. Tronçon is kitchen French for a bone-in cross-section of a round fish, the fish equivalent of a chop, and it survives in restaurant menus more than in home cooking. The garnish name is harder to pin down; "Bercere" appears to be a printer's mangling, and the combination of white wine, vinegar and a fine julienne points toward the Bercy family of white-wine sauces named for the Paris quarter that housed the city's wine warehouses, though here leeks stand in for the usual shallots. The instruction to save the green tops for soup is the tell that this came out of a working kitchen, where nothing edible left the room in the trimmings bucket.