Skip to main content
Main

Bercy Butter

A butter sauce with wine, shallots, parsley, beef marrow, salt, pepper, and lemon juice, served with grilled beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bercy Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Reduce the wine

  1. Combine the white wine and chopped shallots in a small saucepan.

  2. Reduce the wine by half over medium heat.

Make the butter

  1. Cream the softened butter in a bowl.

  2. Stir in the reduced wine mixture, parsley, poached beef marrow, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  3. Do not completely melt the butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with grilled beef.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides the fat and rich, creamy body that holds the flavorings together.
White wine
Reduced to concentrate its flavor and add acidity and aroma.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet aromatic onion flavor once softened in the reducing wine.
Beef marrow
Adds richness and savory depth through its fat and meaty flavor.

The step that matters

Do not completely melt the butter. Creaming softened butter with the wine reduction makes a thick, spreadable emulsion. If the butter melts fully, it separates into greasy liquid fat and loses its body and smooth texture.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, butter, parsley, beef, pepper, lemon):

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, butter, parsley, beef, pepper, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes