from
Behind the French Menu
by
Bryan G. Newman
There
are three different Bercy sauces.
Two
have the same name.
Sauce
Bercy……for fish
Sauce
Bercy …….for meat
The
third is Beurre Bercy
(More
a condiment than a sauce, Beurre Bercy is a wine flavored compound butter
served on steaks and roasts).
Bercy
the village
Bercy's first known mention was on an 11th century a
map; then it was a small village on the River Seine, outside the walls of Paris.
By the 17th century, Bercy had grown and had become Paris's primary wine market
with its streets named after renowned French wines. Apart from bringing in
wines for Paris from the Bordeaux region and the North of France, Bercy
exported French wine all over the world. With that history, it is not
surprising that wine is the base of all three Bercy sauces; however, what is surprising
is that all three use white wine.
Wine
in the cellars of Château La Rose Brisson. Saint Emilion.
Saint
Emilion wines are one of the Bordeaux wines first graded in the 1860s.
They would
have been sold to Paris via the Bercy wine market.
Photograph courtesy of www
twin-loc fr
www.flickr.com/photos/xavier33300/14122281493/
Bercy
supplies wine to all of France.
Bercy supplied Paris with wines, Cognac, oil, and
lumber from the Atlantic coast to the west, Burgundy to the East, and the Rhine
to the North. Then from 1681 also from the Mediterranean via the Canal des Deux
Mers. The River Oise linked Paris to the North and onto Belgium and Holland.
From the mid-1800s, there was also a Marne canal that connected Paris to the
East and onto the Rhine. By 1829 Port Bercy was the largest wine market in the
world.
When Bercy's wine market was in full swing, it was
also a tax-free zone, outside of Paris. Parisians would head out to Bercy and
its beautiful gardens for a night of inexpensive entertainment and drinking.
Only when you brought wine into Paris did you pay tax unless your business was
sneaking the barrels over the walls.
The first Sauce Bercy, was created for fish dishes.
We have no records of the sauce's original creator; the name was simply the
French wine dealers' place of business and began with a local following. The
second Sauce Bercy was a response to the original sauce's popularity and the
demand for a similar sauce for meat dishes. The third sauce is Sauce Beurre
Bercy and is more accurately called Beurre Bercy. Beurre Bercy is a cold, thick butter, a condiment placed on steaks or slices from roasts as they
are served, becoming a sauce as it melts.
Sauce Bercy for fish
Sauce Bercy for fish is white wine sauce made
with butter, shallots, parsley, fish stock, a light touch of garlic, salt, and pepper, sometimes thyme is added. The original recipe for
Sauce Bercy used Sauce Bechamel to thicken the sauce.
Sauce Bercy on fish menus:
Filet
de Flétan
Sauce Bercy – Halibut, served with the fish Sauce Bercy. Halibut is
always served as a filet, as it is the largest of all flounders, flatfish. Most
halibuts weigh over 10 kilos, and some weigh much, much, more. Halibut has a
white, firm, meat with a delicate taste, and it is perfect when served with
Sauce Bercy. The halibut on this menu listing will have been fried, though
halibut may also be grilled, baked, or poached. Though it may be tasty, grilled
halibut will not be on too many menus as it must be basted continually to
prevent it from drying out. A few orders for grilled halibut could hang up an
entire section in the kitchen.
If the
menu had noted flétan noir, that would have been the smaller Greenland halibut,
also called the black halibut, which is an equally tasty fish. Most of the
halibut on French menus will have been flown into France chilled or frozen. The
Atlantic halibut has been over-fished, and with severely depleted stocks,
virtually no halibut fishing is allowed anywhere in the Atlantic.
Saumon Grillé Sauce Bercy – Grilled salmon served with the Sauce Bercy for fish.
Filet de Plie Farcie au Saumon à
la Sauce Bercy – Filet of plaice stuffed with salmon and served with
Sauce Bercy.
Sauce Bercy for meat dishes.
The Sauce Bercy for meats still uses white wine
though, obviously, the fish stock is replaced with veal stock and bone marrow. The shallots, parsley, and a light touch of garlic
remain; thyme, sometimes seen in recipes for Sauce Bercy for fish, is
omitted.
Beurre Bercy or Sauce
Beurre Bercy for steaks and roasts.
Beurre Bercy becomes a sauce only as it is served; it
is really a condiment. This condiment is a thick flavored butter like Beurre Maitre d'Hotel and
or Beurre d'Escargot. These
thickened flavored butters are used to flavor steaks and roasts and are added
just as the dish is served. Beurre Bercy will be decoratively placed on a steak
or slices from a roast and allowed to melt over the meat.
Beurre Bercy on French Menus:
Entrecôte Grillée Sauce Beurre Bercy, Purée de Salsifis – A
grilled entrecote (rib-eye) steak served with the Bercy butter
sauce for steaks and roasts. A puree of salsify accompanies the entrecote. The salsify here is
served as an alternative to potatoes as it is a white root vegetable. For those who
have not met up with the vegetable before, fresh salsify looks somewhat like a
thin parsnip.
Salsify
is also called the oyster plant, a name given by those who considered the
plant to taste like oysters; I can't entirely agree with that, but then I am
naturally argumentative, especially as I had enjoyed salsify when it was served
like asparagus.
Pièce de Boeuf, Sauce Poivre ou Beurre Bercy – This
menu listing translates as a piece or a portion of beef; more often called in
French the steak des bouchers, in English that's the butcher's cut or butcher's
steak. This steak is an especially tasty cut from the rump and offered here
served with either a pepper sauce or the Beurre Bercy, the thick Bercy butter.
When a pepper sauce is chosen, it will almost always be made with green peppercorns. Green peppercorns are milder than black
peppercorns and allow the chef to control the taste. If the steak is chosen with Bercy
Butter, a thick portion of the butter will be placed on top of the steak; as it
melts, it flavors the steak.
Bercy
as the largest wine market in the world.
Bordeaux wines and French bottles
Before mass-produced bottles, nearly all wines, including Bordeaux wines, were brought to
Bercy in barrels, not bottles. Bottles were made by hand and easily
broken.
Before mass-produced bottles, the average size of a bottle depended on the amount of puff that a bottle-maker had, and that could be anywhere from 600 cl to 800 cl.
Hand-blown wine bottles were reserved for the finest wines; it was only in the
late 19th century that automated-bottling machinery became available. Before
automated bottling-manufacturing machinery and bottling plants, 95% of all wine
was sold by the barrel. To buy a few liters of wine, you took your own flask,
usually a large pottery jug, and filled it up at the wine merchant's shop, a
practice sometimes still seen in the country.
Avenue
de Terroirs de France, Bercy
Photograph
courtesy of Payton Chung
www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/5220295/
Bercy's wine dealers often tested blends of wine in
their cellars and gauged public response before sending the details back to the
growers. Some of those wine blends became well-known and remain famous. Bercy's
wine dealers had immense cellars where their wines were stored and blended.
Then from the end of the 19th century, Bercy also bottled many of its wines;
even then, it was still cheaper to bring in wines by train in massive barrels,
the precursor of tanker trucks, and have the wine bottled and labeled after
arrival. One building in Bercy had the most extensive wine cellar in the world
with a capacity of over twenty million gallons.
Wine storage
In 1860, Bercy became part of Paris as part of the
12th arrondissement. Until the 1960s, Bercy had remained Paris's premier wine
market and its main bottling center. As the smaller vintners in Bordeaux and
elsewhere began buying or renting equipment for bottling their wines, many of
Bercy's additional services including bottling closed. With the end of Bercy's
bottling plants, so ended the need for a central wine market.
From
the 17th century Bercy
was
also the entertainment center for Paris.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Bercy also had
large pleasure houses with beautiful gardens that reached the Seine; these were
the most extensive drinking, dancing, and dining taverns inside or outside
Paris. If you were too drunk to ride your horse or carriage home, local carriages would
bring you to your door, and you still saved money compared to drinking and
dining in Paris.
Bercy
as a port in Paris.
By the 16th century, Paris was the largest city in
Europe, with a population of over 500,000. Some 80% of Paris's supplies came
into the city daily by water as most roads were unusable for carriages in
winter. In the summer, even ox-carts could not supply the quantities that the
City of Paris consumed; the distances were too great. From the late 16th
century and onwards, France built canals all over France to provide connections
between its seas, river systems, towns, and cities. Trains did not arrive in
France until the late 19th century. Good national roads only came after the
trains, and so until the trains, waterways ruled France's economy.
Part
of the old port of Bercy that was reconstructed.
Photograph
courtesy of Frédérique PANASSAC
www.flickr.com/photos/10699036@N08/2494655796/
The ports on the river Seine developed their own
specialties, and these ports were the lifeblood of Paris. Large ships coming up
the Seine from the Atlantic could reach as far as the city of Rouen in
Normandy. Roeun is just over 100 km (62 miles) from Paris, and from there,
smaller boats and barges would take the products, produce, lumber, livestock,
oil, wine, and brandies to dock at Paris's River Seine ports and quays.
Today, Paris's ports, quays, and docks are mostly
just names on maps. Nevertheless, Next time you look at a map of Paris, consider
how many ports, wharves, and quays there were, and there are quite a few no
longer on the maps. I will mention just two forgotten Seine Ports: the Port of
the Hotel de Ville, the city hall, which had a working port next to it, and the
Port Saint-Nicolas, which was in front of the Louvre.
Bercy was ideally positioned before the canals were
built; it is a relatively short distance from the River Marne and the River
Oise.
Bercy
and its park from the air.
Photograph courtesy of Mortimer62
www.flickr.com/photos/51408284@N02/5103499966/
Bercy today.
From the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s,
Bercy was in decay; then, in the 1990s, the area began to be gentrified with
major entertainment centers, restaurants, boutiques, and much more.
Much has been preserved or reused in protected
buildings; however, on the maps, only four streets remain with the names of
wines: the Cour St Emillion, Rue de Pommard, Rue de Reuilly, and the Terrace
de Champagne. At a stretch, I could add the Avenue des Terroirs
de France, for a fifth. I may have missed another one or two streets with wine
names, and I will be happy to have them added to the list.
One of the largest parks in Paris is now the Parc de
Bercy; the park was built from three magnificent interconnected gardens. The
Parc de Bercy is linked directly to the Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir, a
footbridge that also accepts cyclists. The footbridge connects the 12th
arrondissement directly to the National Library of France across the River
Seine.
Bercy
as an entertainment center today.
France’s
cinémathèque is situated at 51 Rue de Bercy.
The UGC Ciné-Cité Bercy, the
largest or second largest multiplex cinema in Paris with 18 screens is at 2
Cour St-Emilion.
The Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy is a sports hall also used for large concerts; it
seats, depending on the sport or concert, anywhere from 7,000 to 17,000. Its
address is 8 Boulevard de Bercy.
Palais
Omnisports de Paris Bercy.
Photograph
courtesy of Philippe Berdalle
Photograph
from YouTube
Coldplay
perform December 14th, 2011, at the Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy
Set in old wine warehouses is the Musée des Arts
Forains, the Museum of Fairground Arts, a private museum with a vast collection
of merry-go-rounds, and restored fairground attractions. Its address is 53
Avenue des Terroirs de France.
The
nearest Metro stations.
Two metro stations serve the area, one called, of
course, Bercy, and the other Cours St Emilion.
--------------------------------
Behind the French Menu
by
Bryan G. Newman
Copyright
2010, 2012, 2014, 2020
