No. 623

Ravigote Sauce with Oil

Sauce Ravigote a l'Huile

Pound a handful of chervil, burnet, tarragon and chives, also a little garlic and shallot; add to them a spoonful of bechamel sauce (No. 409), some salt, white and red pepper, ground mustard and grated horseradish root; pass all through a tammy (No. 159), and mix in with it sufficient oil and vinegar to obtain a sauce that will not be too thick.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cold herb vinaigrette bound with a spoonful of white sauce, from Charles Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen. The whole point is the raw herbs, so treat the pounding and sieving as the main work.

The tammy, replacedA tammy (No. 159) is a fine worsted straining cloth through which the pounded mixture was pressed or twisted. A blender or small food processor does the pounding and the smoothing at once; pass the result through a fine sieve if you want a silkier texture.
BurnetSalad burnet is the odd herb out here — a cucumber-scented leaf common in nineteenth-century kitchen gardens and now mostly found at herb nurseries. If you cannot get it, add a little extra chervil and a few slices of peeled cucumber pounded with the herbs; leaving it out entirely is also acceptable.
Proportions"A handful" of the four herbs together comes to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups loosely packed leaves. Keep the garlic and shallot genuinely small — one clove and one shallot at most — or they bury the chervil and tarragon.
The béchamelThe béchamel -- A spoonful of No. 409 is there to give the sauce a little body and soften the acid, not to make it creamy. About a tablespoon of cold, thick béchamel is enough; have it well chilled so it blends smoothly into a cold sauce.
Red pepper"Red pepper" in Ranhofer means cayenne, used by the pinch. The white pepper is for heat without black flecks in a pale green sauce.
Mustard and horseradishGround mustard is dry mustard powder, a scant teaspoon. Grate the horseradish fresh and add it last — its heat is volatile and fades fairly quickly after grating, and jarred horseradish brings its own vinegar into the balance.
Oil and vinegarNo quantities are given because the sauce is finished by eye. Start at three parts mild oil to one part white wine vinegar, roughly 3/4 cup oil to 1/4 cup vinegar for the herb quantity above, and thin further until it pours but still coats a spoon.
Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for eight. It was served cold with boiled or cold meats, calf's head, poached fish and shellfish. Because of the béchamel it should be kept refrigerated and used within two days; the herbs dull quickly in any case.

A Little History

Ravigote comes from ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and the name covers two distinct French sauces: a hot one, a velouté sharpened with vinegar and finished with herb butter, and this cold one, essentially a herb vinaigrette. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen's repertoire, which is why the sauce arrives with a cross-reference to his béchamel rather than a standalone method — the book assumes you have the mother sauces already made. The spoonful of béchamel does clear work here: it gives the vinaigrette enough body to cling to cold meat and enough opacity to look like a sauce on the plate. The herb quartet of chervil, burnet, tarragon and chives is close to the classic fines herbes group, with burnet standing in where parsley would usually go.