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Sauce, Vinaigrette
Chop up very finely half small, sound, white onion, two medium, sound pickles, one tablespoon capers, two branches fresh parsley, six branches chives, two branches chervil and half a cold, hard-boiled egg. Place all these ingredients in a bowl. Season with two saltspoons salt, one good saltspoon white pepper, quarter gill tarragon vinegar and three quarters of a gill sweet oil. Thoroughly mix with a whisk for two minutes and serve in a saucebowl separately.
A classic chopped vinaigrette in the French sense — a herb-and-pickle dressing for cold meats, boiled beef, calf's head, asparagus or poached fish, not a shaken oil-and-vinegar for salad leaves. The measurements are pre-metric but translate cleanly.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill of tarragon vinegar is 2 tablespoons and three-quarters of a gill of oil is 6 tablespoons — a 1:3 ratio, standard for a vinaigrette. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, giving 1/2 teaspoon salt and a generous 1/4 teaspoon white pepper.
- "Sweet oil"Sweet oil meant a mild olive oil, "sweet" in the sense of fresh rather than rancid. A light or mild olive oil is the right substitution; a peppery, aggressive extra-virgin will fight the tarragon.
- The picklesTwo medium pickles here means sour French cornichons or a plain dill-type cucumber pickle, not sweet gherkins or bread-and-butter slices. Sweet pickle throws the acid balance out entirely.
- Chop fine and by handThe texture is the point — everything should be minced to roughly caper size so the sauce spoons evenly. A food processor turns the onion and egg to a wet paste and the parsley to a green smear.
- Chervil and chivesChervil is worth seeking out for its faint anise note, but it wilts and loses aroma within a day or two of cutting. If unavailable, use a little extra parsley plus a few tarragon leaves rather than dried chervil, which tastes of nothing.
- "Two branches" and "six branches"Branch is a translation of the French branche, meaning a sprig or stem. Reckon on roughly a tablespoon of chopped parsley and chervil each, and a tablespoon of chives.
- WhiskingTwo minutes of whisking will not give a stable emulsion with this much solid matter in the bowl, and it is not meant to. Expect the oil and vinegar to separate on standing; whisk again just before it goes to table.
- Yield and servingThis makes about 3/4 cup, enough for four to six as an accompaniment. It is served cold and separately, in a sauceboat, so each diner spoons it over.
Vinaigrette in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French service meant this chopped sauce rather than a simple dressing, and it belonged above all to tête de veau vinaigrette — boiled calf's head, a dish that carried real prestige in classical cookery and has largely vanished from English-speaking tables. The same sauce did duty for cold boiled beef, brains, leeks and asparagus. Its close relatives are sauce ravigote and sauce gribiche, all built on the same logic of acid, oil and finely chopped aromatics, with the hard-boiled egg here doing a little of the work of thickening and softening the vinegar. That this appears in a book called The International Cook Book reflects how thoroughly French professional technique had been absorbed into American hotel and restaurant kitchens by the 1900s; the vocabulary of "branches" of parsley and "sweet oil" is a direct translation of that kitchen French into the language of the household cook.