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Green Ravigote Sauce
Take one ounce of mixed chervil, one ounce of green tarragon, one ounce of chives, one ounce of burnet, and one ounce of parsley; pick and wash these ingredients, and throw them into boiling salt and water for two minutes. Put them into a cloth, squeeze the water from them, and pound them in a mortar with half a pound of butter, mix them thoroughly, and put aside for use. When wanted, stir one ounce of the mixture into a pint of good bechamel or melted butter; add a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar, with six or seven drops of essence of anchovy, and serve. If the sauce is not sufficiently greened with the herbs, add a little spinachjuice. Probable cost of thickening, 1s. per pound.
This is really two recipes: a green herb butter you make in bulk, and the sauce you build from a spoonful of it. The finished sauce is only as good as the colour and freshness you lock into that butter.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian English usage melted butter means the standard flour-thickened butter sauce — a white roux slackened with water or stock and finished with butter. Plain melted butter will not carry the herb paste and will split; use a béchamel if you are unsure.
- The blanch is the hingeTwo minutes in boiling salted water helps set the green and slows the enzymic browning of cut herbs. Longer and flavour leaches out; skipping it gives a duller sauce. Squeeze the herbs well, or the extra water will make a sloppy butter.
- Herb weightsAn ounce is 28 g, so five ounces of picked leaves in all — a substantial amount, roughly a large colander loosely filled before blanching. Half a pound of butter is 225 g, giving about 350 g of herb butter, enough for a dozen or more batches of sauce.
- BurnetSalad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) was a common kitchen-garden herb and tastes faintly of cucumber. It is rarely sold now; increase the chervil and parsley, or substitute a little watercress, rather than leaving a gap.
- Essence of anchovyA thin bottled anchovy extract, once a store-cupboard staple. Anchovy paste or a mashed salted fillet does the same work — start with about a quarter teaspoon of paste per pint and taste, since modern pastes are far saltier than six or seven drops of essence.
- A pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml. One ounce of the herb butter to that volume is a light hand; taste and work up to two if your herbs were mild.
- Spinach juiceA standard period colouring: spinach pounded and pressed for its juice (professional kitchens often warmed the juice to collect the green curd). A quick blitz of raw spinach leaves with a spoonful of water, strained through muslin, does much the same job. Add it late, as prolonged heat dulls the colour.
- Keeping and yieldRoll the herb butter in parchment and freeze it; it slices straight from frozen and keeps well, where refrigerated the colour dulls after a few days. A pint of finished sauce will serve a table with poached fish, boiled chicken or eggs.
Ravigote comes from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and the name has attached to two quite different sauces: a cold vinaigrette sharpened with capers, onion and herbs, and this hot version bound with a white sauce and greened with a herb butter. The green herb paste itself is essentially beurre de ravigote, first cousin to the beurre vert or ravigote butter of the French professional kitchen. The quintet of chervil, tarragon, chives, burnet and parsley is close to the classic French fines herbes group with burnet added, a herb far more familiar in nineteenth-century English gardens than in modern ones. Cassell's habit of quoting a cost — a shilling a pound for the thickening — is characteristic of the book.