No. 396

Raw Fine Herbs

Fines Herbes Crues

Composed of parsley, chervil, tarragon, fennel, chives and pimpernel, picked, washed, thoroughly drained and each one chopped up separately; onions and shallots cut in very small dice or else chopped are considered the same as fine herbs. (The parsley, onions and shallot may be blanched by tying them in a small muslin bag, and plunging into boiling water, then refreshing them several times, afterward extracting all the water they contain.)

← No. 395 Truffle Essence Stocks, Essences & Auxiliaries No. 397 Fumet of Partridge or Other Game →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a component preparation rather than a dish: the chopped-herb mixture that Ranhofer calls for by number throughout the rest of the book. A few of the plants have changed names, and the instruction to chop each herb separately is not fussiness.

Pimpernel means salad burnetNineteenth-century kitchen French used pimprenelle for salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a cucumber-scented leaf, not the scarlet pimpernel of the hedgerow. If you cannot find it, leave it out rather than substituting; it contributes freshness, not a defining flavor.
Fennel here is the frondThe herb is the feathery green top, not the bulb and not the seed. Dill fronds are the nearest common stand-in, though they are sweeter and more assertive.
Chop each herb separatelyRanhofer is explicit that each is chopped up separately. Chopping soft herbs together on one board tends to bruise them into a damp green mass that discolours; chop separately, then combine shortly before use.
Thorough drying is not optionalWet leaves smear under the knife instead of cutting. Spin or blot the herbs bone dry before they meet the blade, and use a sharp knife rather than a rocking chop.
Why blanch the parsley and alliumsThe muslin-bag blanch and repeated refreshing takes the raw sulfurous bite out of onion and shallot and helps hold the parsley's colour. Ranhofer gives no timing; the point is a brief plunge, not cooking. Extracting all the water afterward matters, as the recipe insists, or the mixture will dilute whatever it is stirred into.
Proportions are left to the cookRanhofer gives none. In practice the milder herbs will carry the mixture and tarragon, chervil and fennel are easily overdone, so taste as you build it.
Yield and keepingRaw fines herbes have no shelf life to speak of; make what a service needs and discard the rest.
Where it goesStirred into omelets, sauces, butters and dressings off the heat. Prolonged cooking flattens chervil and tarragon in particular, so add at the end.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) set down the working method of Delmonico's in New York, and its numbered auxiliaries exist so that a hundred later recipes can say "fines herbes, No. 396" and mean one exact thing. The classic French quartet is parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives; Ranhofer's longer list, with fennel, salad burnet, onion and shallot, is often taken to reflect a mid-century French practice in which fines herbes may have meant any finely chopped aromatic seasoning rather than a fixed formula. The note that onions and shallots "are considered the same as fine herbs" is a piece of kitchen shorthand, telling the cook that a dish ordered aux fines herbes may reasonably contain them. The optional blanching belongs to a period when a raw allium bite was considered a fault in refined cooking.