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Ravigote Sauce
Melt four tablespoons butter; add one half cup onion. Add to one cup of Béchamel Sauce, with one tablespoon each of minced and pounded chives, tarragon, parsley and thyme. Strain and serve after reheating.
A short entry that assumes you already have Béchamel on hand and know what to do with a herb infusion. The hinge is heat control: the onion and butter should never colour, or the finished sauce turns beige instead of ivory.
- Sweat, don't brownFour tablespoons of butter to half a cup of chopped onion is a generous ratio; keep the pan at low heat and cook only until the onion is translucent and soft, 8-10 minutes. Any browning will show in so pale a sauce.
- The Béchamel baseThe Bechamel base -- The recipe assumes you already have a cup of Bechamel, the standard white sauce of butter, flour and milk. A medium-bodied version (roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of liquid) suits this quantity; a thinner sauce will not carry the butter.
- Herb quantitiesA tablespoon each of chives, tarragon, parsley and thyme means fresh herbs, minced and then pounded to bruise them and release the oils. A mortar or the flat of a knife does the job. A tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves is a lot of thyme; a teaspoon is closer to modern taste, and dried thyme should be cut to about a third of the fresh volume.
- Why strainThe herbs and onion are flavouring agents here, not texture. Straining through a fine sieve, pressing hard on the solids, is what makes this a classic sauce rather than a herb sauce. If you prefer to leave the green in, chop everything very finely and skip the pounding.
- ReheatingBring it back over low heat or a water bath, stirring, and stop short of a boil. A flour-thickened sauce carrying this much butter will separate if it is pushed hard, and reboiling flattens the tarragon.
- Season at the endNo salt is listed, on the assumption the Béchamel was seasoned. Taste after straining and correct with salt, white pepper and a few drops of lemon juice or tarragon vinegar, which brings the sauce into line with the sharper classical version.
- YieldRoughly a cup or so after straining, enough for four to six servings with boiled or poached meat, chicken, or vegetables. It does not hold well; make it close to service.
Ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and the name is the whole point: a sauce built to wake up plainly cooked meat, poached chicken, calf's head, or boiled vegetables. Classically it exists in two forms, a cold version that is essentially a vinaigrette sharpened with capers, onion and herbs, and the hot version given here, a white sauce infused with the fine herbs and strained clear. The four herbs named, chives, tarragon, parsley and thyme, sit close to the standard French fines herbes group, with thyme in place of the more usual chervil. Lowney's, published by a Boston chocolate company at the turn of the twentieth century, ran a substantial sauce chapter of this kind: a home cook who had mastered one Béchamel could spin a dozen named sauces off it, which suggests something of how the French repertoire reached American households in that period.