No. 603

Green Sauce

Sauce Verte

Wash some parsley leaves, chervil, tarragon, and burnet; plunge them into boiling water in a copper vessel, and blanch them for three minutes; drain, press out all the liquid and then pound the herbs in a small mortar with a few chives added; press them through a sieve, and put into the same mortar a few hard boiled egg-yolks and some anchovy fillets; pound them also, and stir in gradually the green puree; dilute the preparation with some oil, vinegar and mustard, and finish the sauce with a spoonful of finely chopped pickled gherkins.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's sauce verte is a cold herb puree bound with egg yolk and anchovy rather than mayonnaise, thinner and sharper than the versions most cooks know. Two things in the method need attention before you start: the copper vessel and the mortar.

Skip the copperBlanching greens in unlined copper was a nineteenth-century trick for fixing a brilliant colour, since traces of copper stabilise chlorophyll. Use stainless steel and a generous quantity of well-salted boiling water instead; unlined copper leaches into food, and the colour difference is not worth it.
Shock the herbsThe recipe says drain and press, with no mention of cold water. Plunge the blanched herbs straight into ice water before pressing, or the residual heat will dull them to olive within minutes.
BurnetSalad burnet, a cucumber-scented herb rarely sold in shops now. Grow it, find it at a farmers' market, or leave it out and increase the chervil; a little diced cucumber flesh gives a related note.
Anchovy filletsPeriod anchovies were salt-packed and needed rinsing and boning. Oil-packed tins work directly here: two or three fillets to a bunch each of the herbs, tasted as you go, since the sauce takes no other salt.
Mortar workA small blender or mini food processor does the whole sequence, but keep the order: herbs first to a fine paste, then the yolks and anchovy, then the green puree stirred back in. Reversing it gives a coarse, speckled sauce.
The dilution is by eyeNo quantities are given for the oil, vinegar and mustard. Work to roughly three parts mild oil to one of wine vinegar, with a teaspoon of Dijon, added slowly until the sauce coats a spoon and just falls from it.
Gherkins lastThe chopped pickles go in at the end, unpounded, for texture. Squeeze them dry first or their brine will thin what you have just balanced.
Yield and useNo quantities are given anywhere in the recipe, so scale by eye; a few bunches of herbs will make only a small amount of sauce. It suits cold poached salmon, cold chicken, or hard-boiled eggs, and is best made the day it is served.

A Little History

Sauce verte belongs to the classical French repertoire of cold sauces that Charles Ranhofer brought to Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef across two spells between 1862 and 1896, and he published The Epicurean in 1894. The herbs here — parsley, chervil, tarragon and burnet, with chives added in the pounding — overlap with the fines herbes group, burnet contributing a cucumber freshness. Later versions, including the green mayonnaise familiar today, fold the herb puree into a finished mayonnaise; Ranhofer's method instead builds the body from pounded hard-boiled yolks and anchovy, closer to earlier mortar-based sauces than to the emulsions that followed. Salad burnet is now little grown commercially.