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Green Sauce
Use one handful each of any or of all the following green herbs: Tarragon, chervil or curled parsley, burnet, parsley, and chives or green onions. After washing them in cold water put them into boiling salted water, and boil for two minutes, then drain, put them into cold water for a moment, drain again, and pass them through a sieve with a masher. Mix this pulp with the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs rubbed through a sieve, one tablespoonful of vinegar, three tablespoonfuls of salad oil, and a seasoning of salt and pepper. When the sauce is made, keep it very cold until required.
A cold herb sauce built on sieved hard-boiled yolks rather than raw egg, so it is closer to a thick herb paste than to a mayonnaise. The blanching step is the whole point: it fixes the chlorophyll and keeps the sauce green for hours.
- Keep the blanch shortTwo minutes in well-salted boiling water, then straight into cold water. Longer and the herbs turn olive-drab and taste of hay; the cold shock is not optional if you want the colour to hold.
- A handful is roughly a cup, loosely packedThe original gives no weights. Figure about 1/2 to 3/4 oz of leaves per handful once stemmed, and expect all five herbs together to reduce to a few tablespoons of pulp.
- Burnet and chervilSalad burnet has a faint cucumber flavour and is now mostly a garden herb; chervil is seasonal and wilts fast. Either can be left out. Tarragon, parsley and chives alone make a perfectly good sauce, though tarragon dominates quickly, so use the smallest handful of it.
- Sieve and masher, or a small processorSqueeze the blanched herbs very dry first, or the sauce will be watery. A mini food processor or mortar does the work of the sieve, but pass the result through a fine strainer if you want the smooth texture the original method produces.
- Salad oilAt this date the term usually meant a mild refined olive oil, or sometimes cottonseed, rather than a green estate olive oil. A light olive oil or a neutral seed oil keeps the herb flavour forward; a peppery oil will fight it.
- Balance it after chillingOne tablespoon of vinegar to three of oil is sharp by modern standards but the yolks blunt it. Taste cold, not warm, since chilling flattens both salt and acid.
- Consistency and yieldAs written this makes roughly 3/4 cup of a stiff, spoonable sauce -- enough for four to six portions. Loosen with a spoonful of cold water or cream if you want it to coat rather than sit.
- Serving and keepingThe recipe gives no accompaniment, but a sauce of this kind was conventionally served with cold poached salmon or trout or cold boiled beef, and it works as a dressing for cold potatoes or asparagus. Because it contains cooked egg, keep it refrigerated and use it within two days.
This is a green herb sauce in the family of the French sauce verte, here in a form where sieved hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones carry the oil. The herb combination -- tarragon, chervil, burnet, parsley, chives -- is close to the fines herbes of nineteenth-century professional kitchens with burnet added. Sauces of this type were commonly served with cold salmon, and a hotel banquet sauce had to hold its colour until it reached the table, which may explain the instruction to keep it very cold until required. The book itself was published in 1896, recording the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at a moment when that repertoire was still largely French.