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Ravigote Sauce
Four tablespoons of butter; three scant tablespoons of flour; three peppercorns; one-half good-sized onion; a slice of carrot; a bit of mace; a bay leaf; a sprig of parsley; a sprig of thyme; one cup of cream; two cups of chicken stock; one tablespoon of chopped parsley; a slight grating of nutmeg, and salt and pepper. Rub together the flour and three tablespoons of the butter, and add all the other ingredients except the cream, chopped parsley, and the remainder of the butter. Simmer for one-half hour, being careful that there is no burning. In the meantime pound the spoon of butter and the chopped parsley in a mortar, and when the mixture looks rather smooth and green, scrape all of it from the mortar and add it to the sauce. Then add the cream; and if there be not seasoning enough, put in a little more salt and pepper. When the sauce boils up, strain it, and it will be ready for use. This is a delicious sauce for all kinds of delicate fish and meats..
A hot ravigote in the velouté manner: a cold beurre manié thickens the stock, aromatics steep for half an hour, and a pounded green butter goes in at the end. Two details decide whether it works.
- The hinge is the final green butterThe parsley butter is added near the end and the sauce is brought up only to a boil before straining. Cook it longer and the parsley dulls from bright green to olive.
- This is a beurre manié, not a cooked rouxButter and flour are rubbed together raw and dropped into the liquid, so the flour cooks during the half-hour simmer rather than before. Whisk it in in small pieces so it disperses instead of clumping, and keep the pan at a bare tremble.
- "Being careful that there is no burning"A floured cream sauce over thirty minutes will catch on a thin pan. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan, keep the flame low, and stir down to the corners every few minutes.
- A bit of maceMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold today as blades or ground. A single blade, or a scant 1/8 teaspoon ground, is a reasonable reading of "a bit"; it is more pungent and less sweet than the nutmeg grated in at the end.
- The mortarPounding softened butter with chopped parsley to a smooth green paste is a compound-butter technique. A small food processor does it in seconds, or chop the parsley very fine and mash it into room-temperature butter with a fork.
- Strain, and mean itThe whole aromatics go in at the start and come out at the end. Push the sauce through a fine sieve rather than a colander, or the peppercorn fragments and thyme leaves will speckle a sauce that should be smooth.
- Yield and consistencyTwo cups of stock and one of cream, less what the half-hour simmer drives off, gives something under three cups of finished sauce. Expect a coating consistency; if it tightens on standing, loosen with a spoonful of warm stock.
- Not the cold ravigoteMany modern references give ravigote as a cold vinaigrette with capers, shallot and herbs. This is the hot version, and the two are not interchangeable at the table.
Ravigoter is French for to revive or perk up, and the name was applied to sauces meant to wake up bland food: delicate poached fish, boiled fowl, sweetbreads, calf's head. By the nineteenth century the term covered two quite different preparations, a cold herb-and-vinegar sauce sharpened with capers and onion, and a hot one built on a velouté and finished with a pounded green herb butter, which is what the Butterick book gives. The hot version is essentially a velouté plus beurre de ravigote, and it belongs to the classical French repertoire that American domestic-science writers of the early 1900s were busy translating for households with a single cook and no brigade. That the sauce is described simply as suiting "all kinds of delicate fish and meats" is characteristic of the genre: the Butterick books sold patterns and sewing goods alongside cookery, and their culinary chapters aimed at respectable competence rather than technical instruction.