Parsley Sauce
After washing a bunch of parsley boil for five minutes in salt and water. Drain well and cut the leaves from the stalks and chop them fine. Have ready some melted butter and stir the parsley into it. A pinch of cayenne is an addition. Serve with boiled fowls and fish.
A short entry that assumes you already know the base sauce, which is where most modern cooks go wrong. Everything else is straightforward.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butter"Melted butter" is probably a sauce, not butter -- In British and American cookbooks of this period melted butter usually means a thickened butter sauce: butter cooked with a smaller quantity of flour, then whisked with water, milk, or the fish cooking liquid and simmered a few minutes. Proportions vary from book to book. If plain liquid butter is meant instead, the parsley will simply sit in it rather than being carried by a sauce.
- Blanch, then chopBoiling the parsley before chopping is deliberate. It sets the green, tames the raw grassiness, and keeps the sauce from turning khaki. Five minutes is long by modern standards; thirty to sixty seconds in salted water, then a plunge into cold water, gives a brighter result.
- Squeeze it dry"Drain well" is doing real work. Wet parsley thins the sauce and makes it grey. Wring the blanched leaves in a cloth before chopping.
- QuantityA "bunch" is not a fixed measure and the original gives no guide. Take it as however much chopped parsley you want visible in the sauce; a modern supermarket bunch, stalks removed, will give considerably more than most sauces need, so start with a few tablespoons.
- Add the parsley at the endStir the chopped leaves into the finished sauce off the heat, or at most let it come back to a bare simmer. Held over heat it goes dull and bitter.
- CayenneA pinch means a pinch: enough to sharpen the butter, not enough to be identified. Cayenne turns up often as a seasoning in receipts of this kind.
- ServingClassically with poached salmon, cod, or boiled chicken, and traditional with boiled bacon or ham. If the fish was poached, use some of its liquid in the sauce rather than plain water.
Parsley sauce belongs to the great family of English "melted butter" sauces, the flour-and-butter liaison that Victorian and Edwardian cookery treated as a universal base and about which French writers of the same period were, by a durable anecdote, said to be rude. General household books of the era carried variants of it, distinguished only by what was stirred in at the last moment: parsley, egg, anchovy, capers, shrimps. Its pairing with boiled fowl and plain-cooked fish reflects a kitchen where a great deal of protein arrived at the table simply poached, and where the sauce supplied all the seasoning and richness the dish was going to get. The blanching step, which some receipts call for while others simply chop raw parsley in, is the mark of a cook who cared what colour the sauce came out.