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Ravigote Sauce, Green, for Salads, Etc
Make a quarter of a pint of good white sauce or melted butter, stir into it two table-spoonfuls of ravigote butter (see RAVIGOTE BUTTER), and when this is well mixed in add a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar and a few drops of anchovy. If the ravigote butter or the herbs necessary for making it are not at hand, take six table-spoonfuls of good white sauce made with cream or milk, add a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar, a tea-spoonful of Reading or Worcester sauce, a tea-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a little salt and pepper. Pick, scald, and mince a table-spoonful of green parsley-leaves, stir them into the sauce, and serve.
RAVIGOTE SAUCE, GREEN (another way). (See GREEN RAVIGOTE SAUCE.)
A Victorian herb sauce given in two forms: the proper one built on a compound herb butter, and a shortcut leaning on bottled condiments. Both start from a base that needs translating before anything else makes sense.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, then let down with water, milk or stock to pouring consistency. Actual melted butter will split the moment the vinegar goes in.
- Quarter of a pintCassell's uses the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so this is 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 US cup. The six tablespoons in the second version is about 3 fl oz, so that variant makes a noticeably smaller quantity.
- Ravigote butterA compound butter pounded smooth with blanched herbs, typically some combination of chervil, chives, tarragon and burnet, sometimes with shallot; the recipe sends you elsewhere in the book for its own version. Two tablespoons is a generous amount of flavour and colour; if you make your own, blanch the herbs briefly and squeeze them very dry or the butter will weep into the sauce.
- "A few drops of anchovy"Anchovy essence, a thin bottled extract sold everywhere in Victorian Britain and still available. Anchovy paste is far denser — use a scant quarter teaspoon mashed in, not drops.
- Reading sauceA spiced bottled sauce from Cocks of Reading, long out of production. Worcestershire, which the recipe already offers as an alternative, is the practical substitute.
- Chilli vinegar and mushroom ketchupChilli vinegar is simply vinegar steeped with dried chillies and easy to make; mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not a tomato product, and is still sold. Neither is interchangeable with modern hot sauce.
- Scalding the parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water, then squeezed dry, fixes the green and takes the raw edge off. Stir it in off the heat at the last moment — held hot, the parsley turns olive and the sauce loses the point of being called green.
- Yield and serviceThe first version makes a small quantity, about enough for four, as a sauce for cold fish, chicken or eggs. It is flour-thickened, so it sets firm as it cools; for salad use, slacken it with a little cream or the tarragon vinegar until it just coats a spoon.
Ravigote comes from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and the name covers a family of sharp herb-and-vinegar sauces rather than one fixed recipe. French practice generally distinguishes a warm ravigote, a velouté or butter sauce finished with green herbs, from a cold ravigote that is closer to a vinaigrette with capers, onion and herbs — Cassell's is giving the warm kind, here headed for salads. The classic herb quartet is chervil, chives, tarragon and burnet, which is why the sauce belongs to spring cooking; the second version here, a plain white sauce carried by bottled chilli vinegar, Reading sauce and mushroom ketchup, is a very Victorian piece of pragmatism, substituting the manufactured condiments of an industrial grocery trade for a kitchen garden the reader might not have. Reading sauce itself was a well-known commercial rival to Worcestershire in the nineteenth century and appears throughout period cookbooks before fading from the shelves.