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Princes' Sauce for Broiled Fish and Salads
Take a small handful of tarragon-leaves, burnet, chervil, and chives. Rinse them, throw them into boiling water, and let them boil gently for a few minutes; pour off the water, and squeeze them in a cloth. Put them in a mortar with three anchovies which have been washed, dried, and freed from bone and skin, the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, a dessert-spoonful of dry mustard, and a dessert-spoonful of capers. Pound all these ingredients thoroughly in a mortar, add very gradually two raw yolks of eggs, a quarter of a pint of salad-oil, and a quarter of a pint of tarragon vinegar. Rub the sauce through a fine hair sieve, and it is ready for use. Sufficient for a little more than half a pint.
A cold emulsified green sauce in the ravigote family, built the old way in a mortar. The whole thing hinges on the oil going in slowly enough for the yolks to take it.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropTwo raw yolks with the pounded solids will carry 5 fl oz of oil, but only if it goes in a trickle at first, as for mayonnaise. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it gradually.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint here is 5 imperial fluid ounces, about 140 ml or a little over half a US cup, for each of the oil and the vinegar. A dessert-spoonful is taken as 2 teaspoons. The finished half-pint-plus is roughly 1 1/4 US cups.
- BurnetSalad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) was a standard kitchen-garden herb and tastes faintly of cucumber. It is rare in shops now; young leaves from a garden plant, or a little cucumber peel plus extra chervil, stand in acceptably.
- Blanching the herbsThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water is enough to set the colour and soften the fibre. "A few minutes" will dull the green and cook off most of the tarragon's perfume. Squeeze them properly dry or the sauce will be watery and slow to emulsify.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed fillets need the rinsing, drying and boning described. Oil-packed tinned anchovies are already filleted; use three fillets, blotted, and expect a slightly softer, saltier result. Taste before adding any salt at all.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse the solids to a paste first, then dribble in the oil with the motor running. The mortar gives a better texture if you have the patience.
- The sieveRubbing through a hair sieve was how Victorian kitchens removed herb stalk and anchovy fibre. A fine nylon or stainless sieve does the same; skip it only if the paste is genuinely smooth, as the fibres are noticeable on the tongue.
- Tarragon vinegarEasily bought, or made by steeping a few sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. A quarter pint is a lot of acid for the quantity of oil, so add the last of it by taste rather than by measure.
- Raw yolks and keepingThe yolks are never cooked. Use very fresh eggs, or pasteurised yolks if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised. Keep the sauce covered in the refrigerator and use within two days.
Green sauces bound with pounded herbs, anchovy and hard yolk run back through French court cookery as sauce verte and ravigote, and the grand-sounding names attached to them in nineteenth-century English books, "Princes' Sauce" among them, are often said to have been publishers' or chefs' flourishes rather than records of any particular prince. What dates this version is the herb list: tarragon, burnet, chervil and chives are kitchen-garden herbs, and burnet in particular had all but left English cooking by the mid-twentieth century. The sauce is offered for broiled fish and salads because a cold, sharp, herb-heavy emulsion was the standard answer to plain grilled fish before bottled sauces took that job over.