Skip to main content
Main

Green Ravigote Sauce

A green sauce made from blended herbs, butter, béchamel or melted butter, tarragon vinegar, anchovy essence, and optional spinach juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chervil and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Ravigote Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herbs

  1. Pick and wash the herbs: chervil, tarragon, chives, burnet, and parsley.

  2. Blanch the herbs in boiling salted water for 2 minutes.

  3. Drain the herbs, squeeze out excess water, and pound them in a mortar with the butter until well mixed.

Make the sauce

  1. When ready to serve, stir 1 ounce of the herb mixture into 1 pint of béchamel or melted butter.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of tarragon vinegar and 6-7 drops of essence of anchovy.

  3. If the sauce is not green enough, add a little spinach juice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Chervil + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Chervil + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Tarragon + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chive + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Pounded with the herbs to carry their flavour and give the mixture a smooth, rich body.
Béchamel or melted butter
Forms the creamy base that the herb mixture is stirred into.
Chervil, tarragon, chives, burnet, and parsley
Provide the fresh herbal aroma and the green colour of the sauce.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds a light acidity that brightens the rich butter and herbs.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a savoury depth that rounds out the herb flavours.

The step that matters

Blanching the herbs. Blanching for only 2 minutes in boiling water brightens the green colour and softens the herbs. Longer cooking dulls the green through chlorophyll breakdown, and skipping the squeeze leaves excess water that thins the butter.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chervil, tarragon, chive, parsley, butter, vinegar, anchovy):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, tarragon, chive, parsley, butter, vinegar, anchovy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Spinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesCreamed Spinach SoupCreamed Spinach Soup19 recipesSpinach and EggsSpinach and Eggs8 recipes