No. 602

Fine Herbs Sauce and Shallots with Oil

Sauce aux Fines Herbes, et aux Echalotes a l'Huile

This sauce is prepared with chervil, parsley, chives, and small squares of blanched shallots, also some tarragon leaves. Dilute a little mustard in oil and vinegar, season well, and stir in the above chopped fine herbs. Shallots with fine herbs and oil is made by mixing in with fine herbs, and oil is made by mixing in with one gill of vinegar, some salt, pepper, and two gills of sweet oil, chopped and blanched shallots, chopped tarragon and English mustard.

← No. 601 Currant Sauce with Orange Cold Sauces No. 603 Green Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two variations on a herb vinaigrette, printed as a single run-on entry. The second sentence is garbled in the original — a compositor's repetition of "is made by mixing in with fine herbs" — but the quantities survive intact and are all you need.

The measurementsA gill is half a cup. So the second version is 1 cup sweet oil to 1/2 cup vinegar, a 2:1 ratio with more vinegar than a modern 3:1 vinaigrette, and noticeably sharp. The first version gives no quantities at all; work to the same proportion.
"Sweet oil"Nineteenth-century kitchen shorthand for olive oil, chosen for being fresh rather than rancid. A mild, not aggressively peppery, oil suits the herbs best.
Blanching the shallotsThis is the instruction that matters. Thirty seconds in boiling water, then drained and cooled, takes the raw heat and sulphurous edge off the shallot so it does not dominate the chervil and tarragon. Cut them into small dice first, as directed, not after.
English mustardNamed specifically in the second version and it is not interchangeable with Dijon — it is hotter and, if you use the powder, needs ten minutes wetted before its heat develops. Ranhofer's first version says only to 'dilute a little mustard in oil and vinegar'; in practice it is easiest to slacken the mustard in the vinegar before adding the oil.
ChervilRarely stocked and it wilts within a day or two. If you cannot find it, more parsley plus a little extra tarragon is closer than anything else; do not substitute dill, which pulls the sauce somewhere else entirely.
Chopping and timingChop the herbs at the last moment and dress just before serving. Chervil and chives blacken in vinegar within an hour or so, and tarragon turns medicinal if it sits in acid overnight.
Yield and useThe measured version makes about 1 1/2 cups, enough for eight to ten servings. It is filed among the cold sauces; the recipe itself names no dishes to serve it with.

A Little History

Fines herbes is a fixed French kitchen formula rather than a loose bundle of greenery: chervil, parsley, chives and tarragon, all soft-leaved and all added raw or near the end of cooking. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working codification of the classical French repertoire he had learned before emigrating, which is why entries like this one are numbered, terse, and assume the reader already knows what a cold sauce is for. Sauces of this kind — oil, vinegar, mustard and chopped herbs, sometimes shallot — sat in the cold-sauce chapter as utility items, the sort of thing an American hotel dining room produced in quantity. The blanching of the shallot is the detail that marks the entry as professional.