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Sauce Vert-Pre
Place in a mortar one fine peeled shallot, three branches very fresh parsley, two branches chervil, four branches chives and half clove sound garlic. Pound them to a paste; add one ounce butter, pound again until the butter is completely green. Press it through a fine sieve into a bowl and keep in a cool place till required.
Place and melt in a saucepan one-half ounce butter, add one tablespoon flour, stir and heat well; pour in one gill hot milk; sharply mix with a whisk till the sauce is free from any small lumps. Season with good saltspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Remove the pan from the fire; immediately add the vert-pre butter little by little, briskly and continually whisking while doing so; set the pan on the fire whisking it for two minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth into a saucebowl and serve.
A béchamel finished with a compound herb butter. The whole point is the colour and the fresh top note of the herbs, both of which are destroyed by heat, so the finishing stage decides whether the sauce works.
- The hinge: keep the finish off the boilThe green butter goes in with the pan off the fire, whisked in a little at a time, and the sauce returns to low heat for no more than the two minutes stated. A simmer will break the butter out of the sauce and turn the herbs from bright green to olive-grey.
- A gillHalf a cup (4 fl oz). Milk should be hot when it hits the roux, as directed, or the sauce lumps.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So the sauce takes about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne — a genuinely sharp amount of cayenne for half a cup of sauce; start with half of it and taste.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor will do the herbs and shallot; butter softened to room temperature works best either way, since cold butter is hard to pound and takes the colour less readily. Pound the aromatics to a paste before the butter joins them, as directed.
- Chervil and "branches"A branch is a sprig. Chervil is seasonal and often absent from supermarkets; extra parsley with a few tarragon leaves is a commonly suggested substitute, though it shifts the flavour.
- Both strainings are deliberateThe herb butter is sieved, then the finished sauce is passed through cheesecloth. The result is a smooth, pale-green sauce with no visible herb specks — if you want a rustic, flecked sauce, skip the cheesecloth and accept a coarser texture.
- YieldAbout two-thirds of a cup, enough for four modest servings. It is a sauce for poached fish, boiled chicken or eggs, and it does not reheat well; make it just before serving.
Vert-pré means "green meadow," a French kitchen term used for a family of preparations coloured and flavoured with fresh green herbs — most familiar in the grilled steak vert-pré served with watercress and straw potatoes, and in the green butters of the classical repertoire. The method here, pounding shallot, parsley, chervil, chives and garlic into butter and then mounting a white sauce with it off the heat, is a way of fixing herb flavour in a sauce: the butter carries the aromatics, and the delicate finish protects them from the heat that would flatten them.