No. 626

Remoulade Sauce Vert-Pre

Sauce Remoulade Vert-Pre

Place in a mortar four hard boiled egg-yolks with two raw yolks, two spoonfuls of mustard, salt, pepper and a smack of garlic; pound them well together and then press through a sieve and lay the compound in a bowl; work it well, incorporating into it one pint of oil and half a gill of vinegar, till it becomes the consistency of a mayonnaise. Cut three shallots in small squares and blanch them in boiling water, drain and add them to the mayonnaise; chop separately a handful of parsley, chervil and half as much tarragon, burnet, water-cress and chives; mix together all these herbs, and put in three heaping tablespoonfuls to the prepared mayonnaise, color it a pretty pistache color with spinach green, and throw in when finished two spoonfuls of chopped up capers.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's remoulade is a mayonnaise built on a base of sieved hard-boiled yolks, which makes it far more forgiving than a straight raw-yolk emulsion. The work is mostly in the herbs and the coloring.

The hinge: build the base before the oilThe four cooked yolks, mustard and two raw yolks must be pounded and passed through a sieve until completely smooth and paste-like before a drop of oil goes in. Any lump of cooked yolk left whole will keep the sauce grainy, and no amount of whisking afterward fixes it.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup. A pint of oil is 2 cups. Ranhofer's unqualified "spoonful" is usually taken as a tablespoon, though he also writes "tablespoonful" separately here. The finished sauce runs to roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups, enough for a large cold buffet platter.
Oil"Oil" in The Epicurean means olive oil, and a full pint of a modern peppery extra-virgin will overwhelm the herbs. A mild olive oil, or half olive and half neutral, sits closer to what the sauce was meant to taste like.
Spinach greenThis is vert d'epinards, a separate preparation: raw spinach pounded and pressed for its juice, the juice warmed gently until the green solids coagulate, then strained off and used as a pigment. Ranhofer gives it elsewhere in the book. A modern substitute is a thick puree of blanched spinach and parsley squeezed very dry, though it thins the sauce slightly.
Burnet and chervilSalad burnet has a faint cucumber flavor and is now largely a garden herb; chervil is seasonal. Both can be left out without wrecking the sauce, but increase the parsley and tarragon to keep the volume at three heaping tablespoons.
Blanching the shallotsA brief dip in boiling water takes the raw harshness off and stops them from continuing to sharpen the sauce as it sits. Drain and cool them fully, or they will loosen the emulsion.
A smack of garlicMeant as the barest trace; rubbing the mortar with a cut clove, or pounding one and taking out most of it, gets closer to that than a whole clove worked in, which will read as aioli rather than remoulade.
Raw yolksTwo uncooked yolks go into a sauce that is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the sauce refrigerated; it holds two or three days before the herbs go dull and brown.
ServingA cold sauce for poached or cold fish, shellfish, cold chicken, or cold boiled beef. It is thick enough to nap rather than pour.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full record of the French kitchen as it was practiced for American money, and its cold-sauce chapter runs through a series of variations on remoulade. Vert-pre means "green meadow," a nineteenth-century French menu term generally taken to denote a green presentation or garnish, and this sauce sits in the same family as sauce verte and ravigote: a mayonnaise stiffened with sieved hard-boiled yolk and driven green by fines herbes plus a made pigment. The vert d'epinards coloring is worth noting on its own -- classical kitchens kept a stock of vegetable colorings on hand, spinach green for green and carmine or beet for red, because an even, deliberate color was part of what the dining room was paying for. The presence of burnet in the herb list dates the recipe as much as anything else does; it was a common salad herb in the period and has since dropped almost entirely out of commercial cultivation.