Chervil: Herb with verve leaves chefs enthralled with an alternative to parsley

Nation's Restaurant News, July 3, 2000 by Bret Thorn

In the world of American fine dining, even herbs go in and out of style. For some reason, at this time of aggressive chilies and soy and garlic, delicately nuanced chervil is the herb of the moment.

Chervil not only has taken parsley's traditional position as the finishing touch on a plate, perched atop foods as if preening its feathery leaves in the dining-room light, but also is replacing garlic in mashed potatoes, basil in pesto and any number of herbs in butter.

Chervil has the anise flavor of tarragon but lighter and the springlike freshness of parsley but more subtle. In this era of supercharged flavors, chervil offers balance.

"It's one of my favorite herbs," says Erik Oberholtzer, chef at Pacific in San Francisco, who has been serving it with saut[acute{e}]ed scallops and prawns. The seafood is accompanied by white corn blini, buttered pattypan squash, braised fennel and a truffle broth. He drops the chervil in the broth at the last moment. "It kind of perfumes it a bit," he says.

"It's a very delicate herb," he adds. "So it's something you only want to use at the last second. I don't cook it at all."

Oberholtzer often uses chervil with shellfish. When crawfish was in season, he matched it with chervil and saffron gnocchi. He also likes to finish seafood stock with the herb and serve it with lobster and scallops for a delicate but flavorful soup.

Chervil might be trendy, but it's hardly new. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes refers to it in his earliest known comedy, "Acharneis," and the Roman scholar Pliny described its medicinal and culinary uses. The name "chervil" probably evolved from the Greek word chairephyllon, or "herb of joy."

In French cuisine chervil is all over the place. It's combined with parsley, tarragon, chives and sometimes other herbs for the classic fines herbes used in omelets, seafood, butter sauces and other preparations.

But at Atlas, in New York City, executive chef James Danos uses only chervil and not the other fines herbes in the butter that he adds to his wild asparagus, which he cooks with ramps and some red and yellow cherry tomatoes. The chervil "gives it that light sort of herb taste" that refreshes and cleanses the palate. It's also a good balance for the peppery ramps. "That's all I really need," Danos says. "I don't want to hide any of the other flavors" with additional herbs.

Chervil has its place in Italian food, too. At a recent conference on Mediterranean gastronomy in the resort town of Stresa, Italy, chef Domenico Maggi of the Golf Hotel di Rive del Tessori used it to garnish sea bass on pureed white beans, and Antonio de Rosa of the Hotel Villa Romanazzi combined it with basil and baked that blend in a rectangular mold with tomatoes, eggplant and swordfish.

Scott Crawford at Food 101 in Atlanta uses chervil as garnish with a purpose, dropping it on top of pan-seared black sea bass. The fish is served with a tangy orange vinaigrette and risotto tossed with black lentils. The chervil that he places on top of the fish cleanses the palate while cutting the vinaigrette's acidity and balancing out the earthiness of the lentil risotto.

He also uses it to garnish his lamb kebab, which is seared and tossed with sun-dried tomatoes and then surrounded by a walnut-mint pesto. "If you took away the chervil, you might have too much lamb," he suggests. "But you're mellowing it out with the chervil while not overpowering it."

Crawford says the chervil is more functional than curly parsley and more mellow than Italian parsley. Unlike rosemary, it's actually edible raw, and it looks pretty without being extraneous. "You marvel at its attractive delicacy, and it also has a taste function," he says. On top of that, its relative rarity in the United States makes it "a sexy garnish for specials, when you're looking for that little over-the-edge-type look."

Eric Gonzalez, executive chef at Maxim's in New York, says he likes how its sweet and "fresh" flavors balance out the earthy and acidic flavors in his lobster salad with apple-celery r[acute{e}]moulade and truffle vinaigrette. Like Oberholtzer, he also likes to infuse the herb in fish stock, pureeing it with the liquid at the last minute.

Jerry Traunfeld of The Herbfarm in Issaquah, Wash., notes that the umbrella-shaped flowers of chervil go well in salads.

One reason chervil is still fairly rare is that you can't keep it lying around. It's far more delicate than most herbs, only lasting for a day or two before it starts to turn yellow and wilt. It withers quickly in the heat and loses its flavor if it is cooked. Crawford's solution to that problem is to train his staff in portion control and to keep a bare minimum of it on the line.

Susan Goss at Zinfandel in Chicago takes the opposite approach. In the summer she can buy the herb in small quantities from local growers, but the rest of the year she has to buy it in 1-pound packages from California.

"It's exciting," she says, "because it forces you to be creative and it allows you to be extravagant. You can have these lavish chervil garnishes." Even so, she admits that she loses an ounce or two of the herb for every pound she buys.