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Plain Ravigotte Sauce

A bright, tangy sauce made with tarragon vinegar, chili vinegar, Harvey's sauce, butter, and herbs, served with poultry or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and chervil 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 ↓

Plain Ravigotte Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine tarragon vinegar, chili vinegar, and Harvey's sauce in a small saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil and reduce to half the quantity.

  3. Add good butter sauce and chopped tarragon.

  4. Stir in chervil, chives, burnet, and parsley until the sauce is bright in color.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fowls, chickens, or dressed fillets of fish.

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. Tarragon + cherviltop 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. Chervil + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Tarragon vinegar
Adds a sharp, aromatic acidity that gives the sauce its characteristic flavor.
Butter sauce
Provides the rich, fatty body that carries the other flavors and coats the food.
Chopped tarragon
Contributes a distinct aromatic, slightly anise-like flavor to the sauce.
Chili vinegar
Adds acidity and a gentle heat that sharpens the overall flavor.

The step that matters

Reducing the vinegar mixture. Boiling the vinegars down to half concentrates their acidity and flavor, so the sauce is not thin or harshly sour once the butter sauce is added. Reducing too little leaves it weak; reducing too far can make it overly sharp.

Swap the parsley

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

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

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