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Fine Herbs Sauce
Put into a saucepan one tablespoonful each of chopped parsley and chopped onion with two tablespoonfuls of butter, sprinkle in a little salt and pepper, and stir for two or three minutes over the fire; then pour in one pint of white sauce and continue stirring until it boils. It is then ready to serve.
A quick compound sauce built on a base of white sauce — a two-minute aromatic infusion rather than a long simmer. The main things to settle are what "fine herbs" meant here and what the white sauce should be.
- The hinge: sweat, don't brownThe onion and parsley go into butter only long enough to soften and perfume it — two or three minutes over moderate heat. Any colour on the onion turns the finished sauce grey-beige and gives it a fried edge that fights the delicacy of the herbs.
- "Fine herbs" hereThis is an anglicised fines herbes, and Oscar's version is reduced to parsley and onion alone. The classical French mix is parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives; if you want that, add the chervil and tarragon off the heat at the end, since both lose their scent when boiled.
- The white sauceA pint (2 cups) of white sauce. By modern practice that is roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 2 cups milk, though period white sauces were often made with stock rather than milk; if the book gives its own white sauce, use that. A stock-based veloute also works and suits fish or poultry.
- Chop fine, and dry"Chopped onion" at a tablespoon per pint means very finely minced, near a mince paste, or the sauce will be lumpy in the mouth. Squeeze the chopped parsley dry in a cloth first so it doesn't spit in the butter.
- Boil once, brieflyBring it just to the boil to marry the roux-thickened sauce with the butter, then take it off. Held at a boil, parsley goes olive-drab and the butter can separate out.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups. The recipe names no dish; a mild sauce of this kind would suit poached or broiled fish, boiled fowl, veal or eggs.
- FinishingA squeeze of lemon and a scrape of nutmeg at the end are period-appropriate and lift the flour taste. Check the salt only after the white sauce goes in, since the base is usually seasoned already.
Fines herbes came into English cookery with French professional practice, the anglicised 'fine herbs' appearing in English kitchen writing well before the nineteenth century; by the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his book in 1896 the phrase was thoroughly domesticated -- here meaning little more than parsley and onion. The recipe belongs to the great family of derivative sauces built on a white base, the system Careme codified and Escoffier later tidied: make one mother sauce in quantity, then spin off a dozen variations in a saucepan to order. That is precisely how a hotel kitchen the size of the Waldorf's had to work. Oscar was not a chef but the hotel's maitre d'hotel, and his book reads as a record of what the house served rather than a manual of technique, which is why the instructions assume you already have a pint of white sauce standing by.