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Sauce

Verte Sauce

A green sauce made with parsley, tarragon, chervil, fennel, shallot, eggs, capers, gherkins, mayonnaise, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 824 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Verte Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Blanch the parsley, tarragon, chervil, and fennel.

  2. Pound all the herbs together with the shallot or onion, hard boiled eggs, capers, and gherkins.

  3. Mix the pounded mixture with the mayonnaise sauce and salad oil.

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. Tarragon + cherviltop 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

Hard boiled eggs
Mashed into the pounded base, they thicken the sauce and give it a creamy body.
Mayonnaise sauce
Forms the creamy base of the sauce and carries the herb flavour.
Parsley, tarragon, chervil, and fennel
Provide the fresh herbal aroma and green colour that define the sauce.

The step that matters

Blanch the herbs. Brief blanching in boiling water softens the herbs and helps set their bright green colour, so the sauce stays vivid rather than turning dull.

Flavor stand-ins for the fennel

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

  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, tarragon, chervil, shallot, egg, capers, sauce. 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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