No. 372

Herb Broth

Bouillon aux Herbes

Four ounces of lettuce, one ounce of chervil, one and a half ounces of sorrel, all well washed, and cut up fine. Put these into a saucepan on the fire, with a little butter, stirring occasionally; when lightly cooked moisten with two quarts of white chicken broth (No. 188), or its equal volume of water. Let cook for fifteen minutes, adding one and a half ounces of butter and a little salt. Serve this in cups, either plain or with sippets of toasted bread or else with rice, semolina, etc.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A plain green broth from Ranhofer's invalid cookery, and the technique matters more than the quantities: the herbs are sweated, not browned, and the second addition of butter goes in off the heat at the end.

The hinge: keep the pan paleThe herbs go into butter over gentle heat only until they collapse and give up their water. Any colour on the lettuce or sorrel and the broth turns bitter and muddy rather than clean and green.
Weights into handfulsFour ounces of lettuce is a small head of butterhead, or the trimmed heart of a romaine; one ounce of chervil is roughly a supermarket bunch; one and a half ounces of sorrel is about two loosely packed cups of leaves. Weigh if you can, since leaf volumes vary wildly.
SorrelGarden or French sorrel, sharp with oxalic acid, is what gives this broth its point. It is rarely stocked in supermarkets; farmers' markets and garden centres are the usual sources. Baby spinach with a squeeze of lemon approximates the colour but not the flavour, and chervil has no real substitute — its faint anise note is the other half of the dish.
Sorrel discoloursSorrel goes from green to olive-drab the moment it hits heat, and acid leaches into an aluminium or unlined iron pan. Use stainless or enamel, and accept the colour change as normal.
"Moisten"Ranhofer's mouiller simply means add the liquid. His No. 188 is a plain white chicken broth; a good low-sodium chicken stock stands in. Water is offered as an equal-volume option and makes a genuinely light broth for someone off solid food.
The finishing butterThe recipe adds the ounce and a half of butter with the salt at the end of the cooking, so it reads as an enrichment rather than a cooking fat. Swirling it in off the heat, and not boiling the broth afterwards, keeps it from separating and filming the surface.
Fifteen minutesThat is for the broth once the liquid is in, and it is long enough to draw the herb flavour without stewing it. Longer will flatten the sorrel's acidity, which is the only brightness the dish has.
SippetsSmall squares or triangles of bread, toasted dry and added at the table. Rice or semolina should be cooked separately and spooned into the cup, or the broth clouds.
YieldTwo quarts, so about eight cups before any reduction. Served in cups rather than bowls, as invalid food was, it will do for several small feedings; it reheats gently but do not let it boil once the butter is in.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, included in The Epicurean (1894) a section of broths and light dishes for the sick, and this is a French bouillon aux herbes of a kind that had appeared in medical and household cookery well before him. Its ancestry is as much pharmacy as kitchen: lettuce was long held to be cooling and soporific, chervil a spring blood-cleanser, and sorrel a refresher for feverish patients, and broths of this sort were classed as rafraîchissants — cooling broths — in French practice. That older logic may explain why the recipe offers plain water as an alternative to chicken stock: for a patient thought to need nothing rich, the herbs alone were the point. The suggestion of rice or semolina fits the graduated invalid diet of the period, in which a convalescent was moved from clear liquid toward something with body by degrees.