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Sauce

Cold Sauce for Fish

A chilled herb sauce made with parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives, burnet, egg yolks, sweet oil, vinegar, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cold Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herbs

  1. Finely chop and pound the parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives, and burnet in a mortar.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. On a plate, mix the strained herbs with the egg yolks, sweet oil, vinegar, and mustard using a wooden spoon.

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. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Tarragon + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and vinegar, giving the sauce a thick, smooth body.
Sweet oil
Provides fat that carries the herb flavour and gives the sauce richness.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and helps bind the emulsion together.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the herbs and balances the oil.

The step that matters

Mixing the strained herbs with the yolks, oil, vinegar and mustard. Yolks and mustard hold oil and vinegar together as an emulsion. Adding the liquids too quickly or mixing too little can cause the sauce to separate or stay loose.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chervil, tarragon, chive, egg, vinegar, mustard):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Dillfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, tarragon, chive, egg, vinegar, mustard. 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.

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