No. 612

Mayonnaise Sauce, Green with Fine Herbs, Printaniere, and Ravigote

Sauce Mayonnaise Verte aux Fines Herbes Printaniere et Ravigote

Pick and wash a handful of chervil, tarragon, chives. burnet and garden water-cress. Blanch them in boiling, salted water for five minutes, then drain, refresh and press well to extract all the water. Pound this thoroughly, adding the juice of one lemon and some ground mustard. Mix this ravigote into a pint of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606), and color it a fine pistache green with some spinach green.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A classical sauce verte: a blanched herb purée folded into finished mayonnaise. The whole point is the colour and the clean herb flavour, both of which are lost if the greens are overcooked or the purée is coarse.

Blanch briefly, then shockFive minutes in salted boiling water is at the long end for tender leaf herbs; two to three is enough for chervil, tarragon and chives, with cress and burnet taking the longer time. "Refresh" means plunging into ice water at once, which is what fixes the green.
Squeeze the herbs dryWater left in the purée will thin the mayonnaise and can break it. Press the blanched herbs in a towel until no more liquid comes out before pounding.
Salad burnetRarely sold now; it tastes faintly of cucumber. Omit it, or replace with a small handful of parsley plus a few slices of peeled cucumber, well drained.
PoundingA mortar gives the smoothest result, but a small food processor or immersion blender works if you add the lemon juice at the start to get the blades moving. Push the purée through a fine sieve if you want a smoother, unflecked finish; the recipe itself asks only that the herbs be pounded thoroughly.
"Spinach green"A period colouring made by pressing raw spinach, heating the juice until the green solids coagulate, and straining them off. Well-blanched herbs usually give colour enough; if not, a teaspoon of the same purée made from spinach leaves alone will deepen it without added flavour.
Ground mustardDry English or Colman's-style mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Start with half a teaspoon per pint and taste, since the powder needs a few minutes in the wet mixture before its pungency shows.
A pint of mayonnaiseTwo US cups. The recipe gives no egg or oil quantities here (they are at No. 606), but a pint of mayonnaise needs on the order of two cups of oil. A pint of finished sauce will serve roughly ten to twelve as an accompaniment to cold salmon, chicken or eggs.
Raw yolksThe base mayonnaise at No. 606 is uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, keep the sauce refrigerated, and use it within a day or two, as the herb purée shortens its life.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the French repertoire of the Second Empire transplanted to Manhattan. Sauce verte and its relatives belong to a family of cold herb sauces the classical kitchen organised with some precision: ravigote, from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, denoted a sharp herb mixture that could be served warm or cold, while printanière simply signalled spring produce. Piling all three names on one sauce, as Ranhofer does here, was normal practice in a book meant to serve as a working reference for chefs writing menus in French. The recipe itself names no dish for the sauce to accompany.