Skip to main content
Sauce

Tarragon Sauce

A sauce made with tarragon vinegar, butter, tarragon, chervil, and optional glaze.

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

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 ↓

Tarragon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Reduce 2 tablespoons of tarragon vinegar to 1 tablespoon in a saucepan.

  2. Add 6 tablespoons of good butter sauce to the reduced vinegar.

  3. Mix in a little chopped tarragon and chervil.

  4. If the sauce is not strong enough, add a small bit of glaze and a little more tarragon vinegar.

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. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + cherviltop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together561 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Tarragon + saucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together566 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tarragon vinegar
Provides the sharp, aromatic acidity that flavours the sauce once reduced.
Butter sauce
Forms the rich, creamy body of the sauce.
Chopped tarragon
Adds its distinctive aromatic, anise-like flavour.
Chopped chervil
Adds a delicate, fresh herbal aroma.

The step that matters

Reducing the tarragon vinegar. Reducing concentrates the vinegar's acidity and aromatic flavour, so it must be cooked down to the stated volume. Reducing too far makes the sauce overly sharp, while stopping early leaves it weak and thin.

Swap the chervil

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

  1. Chervilthe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

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

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes