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Sauce

Green Sauce or Hot Ravigote

A green sauce made with eschalots, chervil, tarragon, wine vinegar, Veloute, butter, cream, and spinach for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Green Sauce or Hot Ravigote

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, combine the eschalots, chervil, tarragon, wine vinegar, and pepper.

  2. Boil the mixture down, then add the Veloute and boil for a few more minutes.

  3. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a little spinach green to impart a slightly green color.

  2. Finish the sauce by stirring in the fresh butter and cream.

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 + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together78 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eschalots
Provide a mild onion-like aromatic base that flavours the reduction.
Wine vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances the rich butter and cream.
Veloute
Supplies the sauce base body, thickening it as it boils down.
Fresh butter
Adds fat that gives the finished sauce a smooth, rounded texture.
Fresh cream
Adds richness and a silky texture that softens the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture down. Reducing the vinegar and herbs concentrates their flavour and acidity. Boiling too hard or too long can over-reduce the sauce and make it sharp, so the flavour must be judged as it thickens.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chervil, tarragon, wine, vinegar, pepper, butter, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, tarragon, wine, vinegar, pepper, butter, cream. 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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