No. 634
Vinegar Sauce with Fine Herbs
Vinaigrette aux Fines Herbes
A plain three-to-six vinaigrette, thickened with nothing but chopped herbs. The whole of it rests on how finely the herbs are cut and how hard the sauce is stirred before it goes to the table.
- The ratioThree parts vinegar to six of oil is the classic 1:2, sharper than the 1:3 most modern dressings use. Ranhofer does not say what vinegar he means, and modern bottled vinegars vary in strength; if yours tastes sharp, you may want to pull it back toward 1:3.
- SpoonfulsIf an unqualified spoonful is taken as a tablespoon, that is roughly 3 tablespoons vinegar to 6 of oil, a little over half a cup -- enough to dress a salad for several, or to spoon over cold boiled beef, asparagus or a calf's head.
- Fines herbesThe quartet named here — chives, chervil, tarragon, parsley — is the fixed classical set, not a suggestion. Chervil is the one likely to defeat you; it wilts fast and is rarely stocked, and while a little extra parsley with a pinch of tarragon approximates the shape of it, the faint anise-and-hay note is lost.
- Chop, do not bruiseA sharp knife and a single decisive pass. Herbs mashed under a dull blade or run through a processor leach green juice and turn the sauce muddy and bitter within the hour.
- It will separateThere is no mustard or egg here, so nothing holds the emulsion. Whisk hard immediately before serving and pour at once; if it sits, stir again rather than trying to re-emulsify it.
- CayenneA little means a little — a few grains on the point of a knife. It is there for warmth behind the vinegar, not for heat you can identify.
- Make it close to serviceSalt draws water from cut herbs and acid dulls their colour. An hour ahead is fine; made the night before it goes khaki and flat.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that repertoire — some twelve hundred pages of it — in the French professional idiom he had trained in. This sauce sits in a run of cold sauces between a tomato catsup and a shallot-and-mustard vinaigrette, which is a fair picture of the book's range: an American condiment and a Parisian dressing filed side by side. Vinaigrette simply names a thing made with vinegar, and in nineteenth-century French practice it meant this loose herbed oil-and-vinegar mixture served over cold meats, boiled vegetables and offal as well as over leaves. Fines herbes as a fixed combination of chives, chervil, tarragon and parsley was already well established in French kitchens by Ranhofer's day, and he gives it here without explanation.