No. 546

Printaniere Sauce

Sauce a la Printaniere

Pick and wash half an ounce of chervil, half an ounce of chives, a quarter of an ounce of tarragon, and a quarter of an ounce of burnet. Throw these herbs into boiling salted water, to blanch for two minutes in an untinned copper vessel, drain, refresh, and drain once more to press out all the water; pound and add four ounces of butter, a tablespoonful of good vinegar and sufficient spinach green to color nicely; press this butter through a fine sieve and when prepared to use it, add it to a pint of hot allemande sauce (No. 407); season to taste and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A green herb butter beaten into allemande sauce at the last moment. Everything depends on heat control at the end, and one instruction in the original should simply be ignored.

Add the butter off the heatAllemande is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, so it curdles above a simmer and the mounted butter breaks. Take the pint of sauce off the burner, whisk in the herb butter in pieces, and serve at once; it will not hold or reheat.
Skip the untinned copperBlanching greens in bare copper was the classic trick for fixing bright color, and it works because copper ions bind to the chlorophyll. It also leaches copper into salted, hot water. Use stainless steel, blanch two minutes as directed, and shock in ice water; the color will be good enough.
BurnetSalad burnet, Sanguisorba minor, whose young leaves taste of cucumber. It is a garden herb rather than a supermarket one. If unavailable, a little more chervil plus a few cucumber-thin slivers of celery leaf approximates the freshness, though nothing matches it exactly.
The herb weightsHalf an ounce of picked chervil or chives is a small handful of leaves; a quarter ounce of tarragon or burnet only a few sprigs' worth. Weigh after picking off stems, since stems will throw the proportions off badly.
Spinach greenVert d'épinards: raw spinach pounded and pressed for its juice, then the juice heated gently so the green coagulate rises and can be skimmed off and used as a paste colorant. A tablespoon of very finely pureed blanched spinach, squeezed dry, does the same job with less trouble.
Pound and sieveA mortar gives the smoothest result, but a small food processor works if you scrape down often. Pushing the finished butter through a fine sieve or tamis is not optional if you want the sauce glossy rather than flecked.
Make the butter aheadThe compound butter keeps a week refrigerated or three months frozen, rolled in parchment. Only the final mounting has to happen at service.
YieldSomewhat more than a pint once the butter is added; roughly six to eight portions of poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads or eggs.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is often said to owe much to Carême's and Dubois's grammar of French cookery transplanted to Madison Square. Printanière means simply "springlike," the standard nineteenth-century label for anything green with fresh herbs or early vegetables, and the quartet here — chervil, chives, tarragon, burnet — is close to the classic fines herbes with burnet standing in for parsley. The technique of pounding blanched herbs with butter and forcing them through a sieve is what French kitchens called beurre vert or beurre Montpellier in its fuller form; keeping a supply of colored compound butters on hand let a brigade turn one mother sauce into a dozen named ones in seconds. The instruction to blanch in untinned copper is a genuine period detail rather than carelessness: cooks had long observed that bare copper held the green.