Vincent Sauce

Sauce Vincent (a cold herb-green mayonnaise sauce) teaches one discipline: blanchir, to boil briefly and chill at once. Here, color is timing. Eight herbs enter salted boiling water for two minutes only, then cold water stops the cooking while their green is still vivid. Hard-boiled yolks give the sauce a velvet body, and Worcestershire brings a quiet savory depth without announcing itself.

The source formula assumed a saucier, a copper bowl, a mortar, and separate sieve and tammy cloth, with enough sauce needed for service. One cook needs no such procession. The formula here is halved ingredient for ingredient, making a generous dinner-party bowl; a stainless-steel pot replaces the copper, a small processor replaces the long pounding, and two passes through one fine-mesh sieve reproduce the old double refinement. The separate equipment was brigade scaffolding. The exact two-minute blanch, the hard-boiled yolks, and the very stiff Mayonnaise are the dish itself, so they stay.

The source's fresh pimpernel is salad burnet, the cucumber-scented herb called pimprenelle in French; the name changed, the ingredient did not. Have the cold-water bath beside the stove before the herbs touch the pot. Those two minutes decide the sauce.