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Sauce

Sauce Verte

A green herb sauce made with parsley, chervil, tarragon, fennel, shallot, anchovies, egg yolks, capers, oil, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 824 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce Verte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the herbs

  1. Place the parsley, chervil, tarragon, fennel, and shallot in a saucepan.

  2. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Strain the water and dry the herbs.

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the herbs with the anchovies, egg yolks, capers, salad oil, and green food coloring until smooth.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Mix with the mayonnaise and refrigerate.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Shallot + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chervil + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chervil + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together266 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tarragon + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley, chervil, tarragon, and fennel
Fresh herbs supply the main green flavor and color of the sauce.
Anchovies
Add a salty, savory depth that rounds out the herb flavors.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Their fat and smooth texture help bind the pounded herbs into a creamy paste.
Mayonnaise
Forms the creamy base of the sauce and carries the herb flavors.

The step that matters

Drying the herbs after blanching. Herbs that stay wet after boiling dilute the sauce and loosen the mayonnaise, so they should be dried well before pounding.

Flavor stand-ins for the fennel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, chervil, tarragon, shallot, egg, capers):

  1. Fennelthe original
  2. Thymeabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Dillabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Winter savoryabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, chervil, tarragon, shallot, egg, capers. 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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