Home › The Principles of Cookery › Remoulade, Green
Remoulade, Green
Take a handful of chervil, and half the quantity of chives, pimpernel, and tarragon. Throw them into boiling water for a minute, and afterwards squeeze them in a cloth till dry. Pound them in a mortar, and with them a table-spoonful of made mustard, and a little salt and cayenne or white pepper. Beat this mixture well with the yolk of a raw egg, and add, first by drops and afterwards by tea-spoonfuls, three table-spoonfuls of olive oil and one table-spoonful of vinegar. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve, and if it is not sufficiently coloured, add a few drops of parsley or spinach-juice. If preferred, a shallot, a sprig of parsley, four young onions, and four capers may be pounded and mixed with the oil and vinegar instead of the herbs mentioned above.
A cold emulsified herb sauce in the mayonnaise family, built by hand in a mortar. It is quick work once the herbs are blanched, but the oil must go in slowly or the yolk will not hold it.
- The hinge: add the oil in dropsOne raw yolk will carry three tablespoons of oil only if the first spoonful goes in a few drops at a time, beaten constantly. Once the mixture has visibly thickened and gone glossy you can move to teaspoonfuls; the vinegar goes in last and will loosen it slightly.
- "Pimpernel" means salad burnetIn nineteenth-century English herb lists pimpernel is salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a cucumber-scented salad herb. It is not scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), which is not a food plant. If burnet is unavailable, more chervil with a little watercress gives a comparable flavour.
- QuantitiesA handful of chervil is an imprecise measure; a loosely packed cupful is a reasonable reading, but the recipe gives no weight. "Half the quantity" most likely means half as much of each of the other three herbs, though the wording can also be read as half between them. Tarragon is the most assertive of the four, so measure it rather than eyeballing.
- "Made mustard"Prepared mustard from the jar, not mustard powder. A Victorian kitchen would have mixed its own from flour of mustard, vinegar and salt; any smooth prepared mustard is the practical substitute.
- Blanching and dryingOne minute in boiling water sets the green and takes the raw edge off the chives. Squeezing genuinely dry matters: water left in the leaves will thin the sauce and can break the emulsion.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor will pulp the blanched herbs faster than a mortar, but finish the emulsion by hand in a bowl — a machine takes the oil too fast for a single yolk. The final sieving is worth doing; it removes the fibrous stalk threads that pounding leaves behind.
- ColouringParsley or spinach juice is simply the leaves pounded and squeezed through muslin, used raw and a few drops at a time. It is for colour only and will taste grassy if overdone.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated and eat it the same day.
- Yield and servingAbout one-third of a cup — enough for four as a sauce for cold chicken, poached salmon, hard-boiled eggs or shellfish, or as a dressing for celeriac.
Rémoulade is a French sauce name of uncertain origin, generally traced to a dialect word for horseradish or black radish, and it appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward as a sharp cold sauce for cold meat and fish. The green version belongs to a whole family of pounded-herb sauces — ravigote, sauce verte, the older green sauces served with fish — in which chervil and tarragon do the flavouring and blanched leaves supply the colour. Cassell's places it among the sauces of a well-drilled Victorian kitchen, where mortar work of this kind was routine, and gives at the end an alternative version built on shallot, spring onions, parsley and capers.