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Sauce

Sauce a LA Ravingote

A green herb sauce made with chervil, tarragon, chives, mayonnaise, and optionally spinach or peas for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 262 recipes mention both. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the herbs

  1. Wash the chervil, tarragon, and chives.

  2. Boil the herbs in water with salt for 5-6 minutes.

  3. Cool the herbs.

  4. Drain the herbs.

  5. Squeeze the herbs dry.

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the herbs well.

  2. Add the Mayonnaise sauce.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Mix with more Mayonnaise sauce.

  5. If the sauce is too pale, add prepared spinach or mashed green peas for coloring.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Chervil + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together262 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Chervil + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together795 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Chervil + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together544 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chive + spinachtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned 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

Chervil
Provides the main fresh herbal aroma of the sauce.
Tarragon
Adds its characteristic aniseed-like aroma to the sauce.
Chives
Contributes a mild onion-like flavor and fresh green color.
Mayonnaise sauce
Provides the fat and creamy body that carries the herb flavor.

The step that matters

Squeeze the herbs dry. Herbs hold a lot of water after boiling. Excess moisture would thin the mayonnaise and dilute the flavor, so the herbs should be pressed well before pounding.

Flavor stand-ins for the peas

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

  1. Lentilsbetter flavor fit
  2. Beansbetter flavor fit
  3. Chestnutabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, tarragon, chive, sauce, spinach. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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