Chive Sauce
To Cream Sauce (see Page 151) add one tablespoon finely chopped Chives.
A one-line derivative sauce that assumes you already have the book's cream sauce in front of you. Since that page is not reproduced here, the useful work is in reconstructing the base and getting the chives in at the right moment.
- The cream sauce it refers toPage 151 is not reproduced here, so the base has to be reconstructed. A cream sauce of this kind is usually a basic white sauce: butter and flour cooked together without colouring, then whisked with milk or thin cream and simmered until it coats a spoon. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a medium sauce, which is what a chopped-herb sauce wants.
- Add the chives off the heatThis is the hinge. Chives lose their onion sweetness and turn grassy-grey within a minute or two of simmering. Stir them in after the sauce is finished and hold it covered off direct heat.
- ChoppingCut chives with a sharp knife or scissors in one pass; crushing them under a dull blade bruises the hollow stems and leaves a slimy edge in the sauce. A tablespoon is roughly a small bundle the thickness of a pencil.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the base sauce is already salted. Taste after the chives go in, since their mild pungency can read as under-seasoned; a scrape of white pepper and a few drops of lemon sharpen it without breaking the cream.
- YieldOn the reconstruction above, about one cup of finished sauce, enough for four servings poured over poached fish, boiled new potatoes or eggs. The original states no quantity.
- Dried chivesNot a real substitute. The point of the recipe is fresh green flecks and a raw onion top note, both of which dried chives give only faintly if at all.
Cream sauce with a single chopped herb stirred in at the end is a familiar pattern in cookbooks that teach white sauce as a foundation and then build a family of variations off it by addition alone. That is what is happening here: the line depends entirely on the reader turning back to page 151. Chives are at their best in a northern kitchen garden in early summer, before the plants flower and the leaves toughen; they were a common dooryard perennial long before they were a supermarket item, and a household with any garden at all would likely have had a clump to cut from. The pairing with cream is old and unremarkable across northern Europe, where mild alliums and dairy have long kept company.