No. 449

Chivry Sauce

Sauce a la Chivry

Blanch in a red copper untinned vessel a handful of herbs composed of parsley leaves a third; chervil a third; pimpernel a sixth, and tarragon a sixth; drain them and extract well all their moisture, then put them into a mortar with a pinch of chives, pound them finely, adding a piece of butter, and after removing the preparation from the mortar rub it through a sieve, and add to it three gills of reduced veloute (No. 415) and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Color the sauce with a little spinach green or green vegetal coloring.

← No. 448 Chervil or Parsley Pluche Sauce Hot Sauces No. 450 Clermont Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A compound herb butter beaten into velouté — essentially a green fines-herbes sauce for poached poultry, veal or eggs. Most of what needs translating here is the equipment and one obsolete herb name.

The untinned copper vesselRanhofer calls for raw copper because copper ions bind to chlorophyll and hold a vivid green through blanching. It also leaches copper into the food, which is why the practice was condemned as adulteration by the end of the century and is not done now. Blanch the herbs in a stainless or enamelled pan and accept a slightly softer green.
PimpernelThis is salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor), a cucumber-scented herb once standard in French kitchen gardens, not scarlet pimpernel. If you cannot find it, increase the chervil and parsley rather than substituting something assertive.
Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is a cup and a half of reduced velouté (No. 415).
Blanch brieflyThirty seconds to a minute in well-salted boiling water, then straight into ice water. Longer and the tarragon and chervil turn hay-flavoured and grey. Squeeze the herbs genuinely dry before pounding or the butter will not take up the purée.
The hinge: no boiling after the butter goes inThe herb butter is best beaten into the finished velouté off the heat, or over the barest warmth. Brought to a simmer the butter can separate out and the green dulls to olive.
Mortar or machineA small food processor or a blender with a splash of the butter will do the pounding, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve — burnet and parsley stems leave fibres that a blade will not resolve.
Green coloring"Spinach green" is nineteenth-century vert d'épinards: spinach juice heated until the chlorophyll coagulates, then collected in a cloth. A tablespoon of very finely puréed blanched spinach folded in at the end gives the same effect without bottled dye.
Yield and servingAbout a cup and a half, enough for six to eight portions. It belongs with poached chicken or veal, soft eggs, or poached white fish, and should be sauced at the table since it will not sit long on heat.

A Little History

Chivry sauce belongs to the family of green herb sauces that classical French cookery built on velouté and allemande, and the name is generally traced to a Chivry butter — a pounded compound of parsley, chervil, tarragon, burnet and chives — that also flavoured the eponymous white wine reduction. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working compendium of that repertoire, which is why the entry is terse and cross-referenced rather than explained: a cook using it was expected to have velouté (No. 415) already reduced on the stove. The instruction to blanch in bare copper is a period fingerprint. It was standard professional practice for keeping greens brilliant, defended by chefs and attacked by public-health chemists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and it disappeared from kitchens along with the untinned pans themselves.