Not Just Stew · The atlas · A working atlas of the world's cooking

Central Europe · Volume 39, The Vinegar Cure, the Seven Herbs and the Butter Letter

Frankfurter Grüne Soße

Frankfurt

Frankfurter Grüne Soße, a cold sauce of seven herbs in soured cream with hard boiled eggs and boiled potatoes: a bowl of thick pale green herb sauce speckled with chopped herbs beside halved hard boiled eggs with yellow yolks and small boiled potatoes in their skins.

Illustration

The protected sauce of Frankfurt, made with no heat from borage, chervil, garden cress, parsley, salad burnet, sorrel and chives, the herbs grown in the city's own districts under the European name. The weights are for 200 g of herbs to 400 g of cream, and the method is the one every Frankfurt source gives.

As tradition built it

Serves a table. No cooking for the sauce; it rests in the cold before it is served.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Wash the seven herbs, borage, chervil, garden cress, parsley, salad burnet, sorrel and chives, and chop the leaves, stalks and shoot tips fine or pass them through a mill, keeping the mix so no one herb dominates.
  2. Stir the herbs into the soured cream or Schmand with the oil, the vinegar, salt and sugar.
  3. Rest the sauce in the cold so the herbs give up their taste. Meanwhile hard boil the eggs and boil the potatoes in their skins.
  4. Serve cold, with hard boiled eggs halved on top and the boiled potatoes in their skins beside.

What a modern chef changes

The seven herbs kept distinct, the cream cultured

Rung 3

Method

  1. Blend six of the herbs with the soured cream and pass the sauce through a chinois; keep the chives for the end, cut fine with a knife, so the sauce has texture as well as colour.
  2. Culture the base: a soured cream and a spoon of buttermilk left overnight at room temperature gives the sauce more acid and less need of vinegar.
  3. A soft boiled egg at 63 degrees for an hour, the yolk just set, on top of the sauce; the hard boiled egg is the tradition and the soft one is the restaurant's.
  4. Grow the burnet, the borage and the sorrel; nothing in a British shop sells them together, and the sauce without them is a herb mayonnaise.
Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists