Chervil

Chervil: History and Complete Culinary Guide

Chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium) is one of the four classical fines herbes of French cuisine alongside tarragon, parsley, and chives — a delicate, feathery herb with a subtle anise flavour and a more complex, mellow character than its bolder companions. Native to the Caucasus and southwestern Asia, chervil has been used in European cooking since Roman times. In French cooking, it is most important in its fresh form: dried chervil has a much reduced character and should be added only when fresh is unavailable. It appears in classic French herb sauces (sauce gribiche, sauce verte), in omelettes, in soups, in béarnaise alongside tarragon, and as a spring garnish. As a dried spice (the form represented in this nutritional entry), it retains some of the anise character but lacks the delicate freshness of the fresh herb.

Culinary Uses

Fresh chervil: add at the end of cooking or use raw as a garnish — heat destroys its delicate character. Use in French herb omelettes, in cold sauces, in salads with other spring herbs, and as a garnish for soups and vegetables. Dried chervil: add to slow-cooked dishes where the residual anise note integrates into the overall flavour. Classic combinations include chervil with eggs, with fish (particularly salmon and sea bass), with root vegetables, and with cream sauces.

Chervil in more detail

Chervil is the herb most British cooks have never used and most French ones would not be without. It is one of the four fines herbes — with parsley, tarragon and chives — and it tastes faintly of anise and parsley at once, delicate to the point of fragility.

That fragility is the whole story of how to handle it. Chervil's aromatics are more volatile than almost any other culinary herb: heat destroys them within seconds, drying destroys them entirely, and even chopping too far ahead loses a noticeable amount. Dried chervil is essentially a green powder with no flavour, and buying it is a waste of money. It belongs stirred into an omelette off the heat, scattered over fish as it goes to the table, or folded into a béarnaise at the last moment.

It is also almost absent from British shops for a practical reason: it bolts fast in warm weather and wilts within a day of cutting, so it does not survive a supermarket supply chain. It is easy to grow from seed in a shady spot — it prefers the conditions that make most herbs sulk — and that is realistically how to get it.

One caution belongs on this page. Chervil is an umbellifer, and several wild umbellifers it superficially resembles — hemlock and fool's parsley among them — are seriously poisonous. Foraging for wild chervil is not a beginner's activity.

Nutrients worth knowing about

The 237 kcal, 23.2 g protein and 11.3 g fibre per 100 g on this page are figures for the dried herb. Given that dried chervil has no useful flavour and that fresh chervil is used by the tablespoon, neither number describes anything anyone eats.

Nominally it is a source of Iron, Magnesium, Calcium, Vitamin C and Vitamin B9 (Folate / Folic acid). In practice, chervil is in your kitchen for flavour and for nothing else, and that is a perfectly good reason for it to be there.

Other soft herbs