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Ravigote Sauce Hot
1 cup consomme 1/2 teaspoon vinegar 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 clove of garlic 2 tarragon leaves 2 chervil leaves 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook the herbs, chopped fine, with the vinegar and consomme for ten minutes and drain through a cloth. Melt the butter, add the flour, mixed with seasonings, cook together, add the consomme, a little at a time. When it becomes smooth add the chopped herbs.
A small velouté-style sauce built on stock rather than milk, meant to be spooned over poached or baked fish. It makes roughly one cup, enough for two to four servings.
- ConsomméAny clear, well-flavoured stock will do; a light chicken or veal stock suits the sauce. Canned consommé is often heavily salted, so hold back the 1/4 teaspoon of salt until the sauce is finished and taste first.
- The garlic is listed but never usedThe ingredient list calls for half a clove and the method never mentions it. Simmer it with the herbs, vinegar and consommé and it will be caught in the straining cloth, which is probably the intent.
- Straining, then returning the herbsThe instruction reads oddly because the herbs are strained out and then added back. Keep the solids from the cloth, pick out the garlic, and chop the drained herbs finely before stirring them in at the end so the sauce stays clear but still tastes green.
- Fresh herbs, and how fewTwo tarragon leaves and two chervil leaves is a scant amount by modern taste; a teaspoon each of chopped fresh leaves is more in keeping with how ravigote is served now. Dried chervil contributes almost nothing, so use fresh or leave it out and lean on the tarragon.
- VinegarHalf a teaspoon is a seasoning, not an acidulation. White wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar suits the sauce; cider or malt vinegar will dominate it.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons of flour to one of butter is a dry, lean roux. Cook it a minute or two over low heat to lose the raw taste, then add the hot liquid in stages, whisking smooth before each addition, or it will go lumpy. It thickens firmly, so thin with a little more stock if you want it pourable.
- ServingFinish and serve at once. Held on the heat, the flour continues to swell and the fresh herbs turn drab and grassy.
Ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and the family of sauces has existed in both a cold vinaigrette form and this hot, thickened one since at least the eighteenth-century French kitchen. Escoffier's version is a velouté reduction finished with shallot butter and chopped herbs, and this Gold Medal rendering is a plain American shorthand of the same idea: strain the flavour out of vinegar and herbs, build a small flour sauce on stock, put the herbs back. Its appearance in a flour company's cook book is telling. Books like this one were published to sell a specific brand of flour, and a chapter of white sauces gave the miller a reason to put its name into a dish where the flour is doing nothing but thickening. The tarragon-and-chervil pairing, with parsley and chives, is the classic fines herbes group.