No. 448

Chervil or Parsley Pluche Sauce

Sauce a la Pluche de Cerfeuil ou de Persil

A pluche is the leaves of either parsley or chervil blanched and combined with a sauce or soup. Reduce one pint of veloute (No. 415) with two gills of white wine; season with salt, pepper, nutmeg and the juice of a lemon, and just when serving incorporate into it four ounces of fresh butter. Should the sauce be too thick add a little broth (No. 187), and then put in a heavy pinch of blanched chervil or parsley leaves.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A short finishing sauce built on velouté, with the herb going in at the last second. Nearly everything that can go wrong here happens after the butter is added.

The hinge: mount the butter off the heatThe hinge: mount the butter at the last moment -- The four ounces (1 stick, 115 g) of butter go in just as the sauce is served, whisked in a few pieces at a time. The book does not say to take the pan off the heat, but that is the usual precaution: returning a butter-finished sauce to a simmer can break it and leave a greasy film on top.
Two gills of wineA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup (240 ml) of dry white wine. Reduce it with the pint of velouté until the raw alcohol has cooked off and the sauce coats a spoon — figure a third or so of the total volume gone.
Velouté, No. 415A blond roux slackened with white stock — veal, chicken or fish depending on what the sauce is going to. Any well-made light stock-based sauce of nappe consistency will stand in; about a pint (480 ml).
What a pluche isRanhofer's first line defines it only as the leaves of parsley or chervil, blanched and combined with a sauce or soup: whole leaves, not chopped herb. The blanching itself (a brief dip in boiling water, then refreshed) is standard practice rather than anything the entry spells out.
Add the herb at the very endA 'heavy pinch' is generous here, but the book gives no measure. Sustained heat will yellow the leaves and drab the sauce, which is why they go in last.
Nutmeg and lemonBoth are seasoning, not flavour statements. A few scrapes of nutmeg; the recipe calls for the juice of a whole lemon, which is a good deal of acid for a pint of sauce, so add it to taste.
Broth, No. 187The book's own broth. Any light unsalted stock loosens the sauce without dulling it; avoid water, which flattens the reduction you just built.
Yield and serviceRoughly 2½ cups, enough for eight to ten portions. It is a coating sauce for poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads or a white fish, and it will not hold: make it as the plates go out.

A Little History

Pluche is generally traced to the French peluche, or 'plush', and in nineteenth-century professional kitchens it meant exactly what Ranhofer says — whole herb leaves, blanched, scattered into a sauce or floated in a consommé as a garnish rather than an infusion. Chervil is one of the herbs called for; it has an anise note that parsley lacks and it wilts almost on contact with hot liquid, which is why classical practice blanches it first. The Epicurean (1894) sets this among dozens of small variations on velouté, each differing by a single addition — Chivry with its herb butter follows immediately after — a structure in which a cook learned the handful of mother sauces and then a long catalogue of finishes. That Delmonico's kitchen kept blanched chervil leaves at hand through service says a good deal about the labour available to a New York restaurant of that period.