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Tarragon Sauce
Put a few branches of green tarragon and one wineglassful of white wine vinegar into a saucepan, and boil for about ten minutes; then add four tablespoonfuls of veloute sauce, and the yolks of two eggs to thicken. Pass the liquor through a fine hair-sieve or cloth into a basin, add a few leaves of tarragon, blanch them, and cut them up rather small. Flavor with lemon juice, and season to taste with salt and pepper. The sauce is then ready for use and should accompany boiled fowl.
A reduction-and-yolk sauce in the classic French manner, written for a brigade that already had velouté on the stove. The whole thing takes ten minutes once you have the base.
- The hinge: keep the yolks below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will scramble and break. Hold it around 160-170F, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, or a scant quarter cup. Reducing that much vinegar for ten minutes leaves very little liquid, which is the point: it becomes a concentrated tarragon essence.
- VeloutéA blond roux (equal butter and flour, cooked without coloring) moistened with white veal or chicken stock and simmered until smooth. Four tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup; if you have no velouté, a thick chicken-stock white sauce stands in.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine sieve of the period; being non-metallic it also suited acidic preparations. Any fine nylon or stainless strainer does the job, and the recipe itself allows a cloth as an alternative.
- Blanching the tarragonTen seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold, sets the green and softens the anise edge before the leaves are chopped and stirred in at the end. Skipping it leaves the garnish harsh and dull-looking.
- Which tarragonThis wants French tarragon. Russian tarragon, common in garden centers, is coarse and nearly flavorless and will not carry a reduction.
- Seasoning orderAdd the lemon juice last and taste before salting; the vinegar reduction is already sharp, and lemon on top can tip it over.
- YieldA third to a half cup of finished sauce, enough for two to four servings alongside a poached or boiled fowl. It does not reheat well over direct heat, so make it just before serving.
Tarragon sauce belongs to the family of small compound sauces built off a mother sauce, the pattern codified in the grand-hotel kitchens of the period: a stock-based velouté kept hot all service, then split and flavored to order. The plan here, reducing herb and vinegar to an essence and finishing with yolk, echoes the logic behind bearnaise, though bearnaise is finished with butter rather than a velouté base; tarragon is the herb both lean on. The recipe directs the sauce to boiled fowl, a mild, moist bird that takes an acid, aromatic sauce rather than gravy. The instruction to strain through a hair sieve dates the recipe as clearly as the wineglass measure: horsehair mesh was the fine strainer of the nineteenth-century kitchen, and being non-metallic it served acidic preparations well.