Blanch in boiling and salted water, one handful of chervil, parsley, tarragon and pimpernel; drain and pound these with a few capers; press through a sieve and mix this puree with a veloute sauce (No. 415), then reduce and despumate, adding some chicken stock (No. 195); reduce once more, and now add the juice of one lemon and some spinach green, also half its quantity of either meat, chicken, or game jelly.
Escoffier-era coating sauce from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, written for a professional kitchen with stocks and jellies already on hand. The whole point is that it must set: get the jelly proportion right and the rest is straightforward.
Chaudfroid — "hot-cold" — names a dish cooked hot and served cold under a set sauce, and the term is generally traced to eighteenth-century French practice, with a much-repeated but undocumented story about an improvised cold supper at a maréchal's table. By the time Charles Ranhofer was running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, the chaudfroid had become a fixture of the cold buffet: the way a kitchen demonstrated technique on a table where nothing steams. The Epicurean (1894) devotes a run of numbered recipes to them — the neighbouring entries here are brown and game, green, and white — because they were building blocks, each cross-referenced to a velouté or a jelly elsewhere in the book rather than written out whole. The green version belongs to the ravigote family, from ravigoter, to perk up or invigorate, a name attached in French cookery to preparations sharpened with fresh herbs, capers and lemon. Its natural home was the ornamented cold platter, where a chicken breast or a poached egg was coated pale green, glazed with clear aspic, and decorated with cut truffle and blanched tarragon leaves.