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BUTTER, RAVIGOTE (a la Gouffe)
This butter is composed of the following ingredients, pounded together in a mortar:--First, blanch in boiling water for two minutes, one pound of herbs--tarragon, mixed chervil, burnet, chives, and cress--then press out the water by squeezing them in a cloth. Put them, with half a dozen well-mashed anchovies, and the same number of hard boiled eggs, into a mortar, add a piece of garlic (about the size of a pea), a seasoning of salt and pepper, two ounces of gherkins, and two ounces of capers; these last should be well squeezed from the vinegar. When well pounded and smoothed through a sieve they are to be mixed with two pounds of butter, two table-spoonfuls of oil, and one of tarragon vinegar, and again pounded and mixed for use.
A compound butter in the grand nineteenth-century manner, scaled for a professional kitchen. The hinge is the blanching: two minutes and no more, then an immediate squeeze dry, or the herbs turn olive-drab and waterlogged and the butter will weep.
- Scale it downAs written this makes roughly three and a half pounds of butter. Quarter or eighth the quantities: 4 oz herbs, 1-2 anchovy fillets, 1-2 hard-boiled eggs, 1/2 oz each gherkins and capers, 8 oz butter, and a teaspoon each of oil and tarragon vinegar.
- A pound of herbsThat is leaves only, stems discarded, and it is a startling volume - several large supermarket bunches. Weigh after picking, not before.
- Burnet and cressSalad burnet has largely disappeared from shops; it tastes faintly of cucumber, and a little parsley plus a few cucumber-skin shavings reads similarly. "Cress" here most likely means watercress or garden cress.
- Keep the colourAfter the two-minute blanch, drop the herbs into ice water before squeezing them in the cloth.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse the herbs, anchovy, eggs and pickles to a paste first and only then add cold-but-pliable butter, or the butter breaks and greases out.
- The sieve stepPushing the paste through a fine sieve or tamis is what makes it smooth enough to pipe or spread. Skip it and you get a rustic, flecked butter, which is perfectly good but not what is described.
- SaltAnchovies and capers bring plenty. Use unsalted butter and season at the end, after tasting the finished mix.
- Serving and keepingRoll in parchment into logs, chill firm, and cut coins to melt over grilled fish, steak or boiled potatoes. It keeps about five days refrigerated, three months frozen; the raw garlic and herbs fade well before the fat does.
Jules Gouffe, chef to the Paris Jockey Club and author of Le Livre de Cuisine (1867), was one of the authorities English cookery writers might reach for when they wanted a dish stamped as unimpeachably French. The name comes from the French ravigoter, to revive or invigorate, and it attaches to a whole family of sharp green preparations - a herb sauce, a vinaigrette, and this butter - all built on the same axis of fresh herbs, capers, pickles and something salty. Compound butters were the backbone of nineteenth-century service: a kitchen sending out dozens of grilled cuts a night needed finishes that could be made in quantity in the morning and sliced to order.