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Sauce

Mayonnaise Sauce a LA Ravigotte

A mayonnaise-based sauce flavored with a blend of chervil, tarragon, burnet, and chives, tinted with spinach juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mayonnaise Sauce a LA Ravigotte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herbs

  1. Wash and pick a handful each of chervil, tarragon, burnet, and chives.

  2. Boil the herbs in salted water for 6 to 8 minutes.

  3. Transfer the herbs to cold water, then strain them.

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the herbs in a mortar and rub them through a fine cloth.

  2. Mix the herb pulp with some Mayonnaise sauce and color it with 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 + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Chervil + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together78 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

Chervil
Provides the main fresh herbal flavor of the sauce.
Tarragon
Adds its characteristic aniseed-like aroma to the sauce.
Burnet
Contributes a light, cucumber-like freshness to the herb blend.
Chives
Adds a mild onion note and a fresh green flavor.
Mayonnaise sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the herb pulp.

The step that matters

Boiling the herbs for 6 to 8 minutes. Brief blanching in salted water sets the herb color and softens the leaves for pounding, while a longer boil dulls the green and loses flavor. Immediately moving them to cold water stops cooking and keeps the sauce bright green.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, tarragon, chive, sauce. 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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