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Ravigote Butter, for Sauces
Take two large table-spoonfuls of mixed tarragon, chervil, burnet, chives, and cress. Pick and wash them, and throw them into boiling water for two minutes; press the water from them in a cloth, put them on a plate, and mix with them a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, half a spoonful of chilli vinegar, and a little pepper and salt. When these ingredients are thoroughly blended, turn the whole into a basin, and put it in a cool place till wanted. If all these herbs cannot be procured, good ravigote butter may be made with tarragon and chervil only.
A compound herb butter, whisked into sauces at the last moment or set on grilled fish and steak. The technique is straightforward; the only real difficulties are sourcing the herbs and keeping the butter from splitting.
- The hinge: blanch, then squeeze dryThe two-minute plunge in boiling water sets the chlorophyll so the butter turns a clear green rather than khaki. Wringing the herbs in a cloth matters just as much — any residual water will make the butter weep and break when it hits a hot sauce.
- QuantitiesA quarter of a pound is 4 oz (115 g), one standard American stick. "Two large table-spoonfuls" of picked herbs is the loose, heaped spoon of the period rather than a modern level measure, so the amount is approximate; "half a spoonful" of vinegar is likewise unspecified — probably no more than a teaspoon or so.
- The herbs, and the substitutesTarragon and chervil are the flavour; chives are easy; salad burnet (a faint cucumber note) and garden cress are farmers'-market or windowsill items. The book's own fallback — tarragon and chervil alone — is sound. Watercress stands in for cress; do not use parsley as a tarragon substitute, it takes the mixture somewhere else entirely.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: wine or cider vinegar steeped with dried red chillies for a week or two. A good white wine vinegar with a pinch of cayenne is the nearest quick equivalent.
- MixingHave the butter properly soft but not oily, chop the squeezed herbs fine, and work everything together with a fork or in a small processor. Overworking warm butter emulsifies out; if it looks greasy, chill it briefly and beat again.
- Keeping"A cool place" was a larder. Roll it in parchment into a cylinder and refrigerate up to five days, or freeze up to three months and slice off coins as needed.
- Using itAdd it off the heat, in small pieces, swirling until just melted. Boiling a herb butter into a sauce dulls the tarragon and risks separation.
Ravigote comes from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and by the eighteenth century the name was in use in French cookery for sharp green mixtures of herbs, vinegar and something fatty — sometimes a warm sauce, sometimes a cold vinaigrette with capers and shallot, and here in its most concentrated form as a compound butter. The particular quintet of tarragon, chervil, burnet, chives and cress reflects a kitchen garden rather than a shop; burnet and cress are much less used in British cooking today, though the recipe's own reason for offering the tarragon-and-chervil fallback is not stated. Compound butters of this kind were made in advance and kept in a cool larder so that a cook could finish a sauce or dress a grilled cutlet quickly, the same logic behind maître d'hôtel and anchovy butters.