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Green Dutch Sauce
Make half a pint of good bchamel sauce (see BECHAMEL). Wash some young parsley-leaves, and put them, while wet, into a mortar. Pound them to a pulp, and squeeze out the juice which comes from them into the sauce until it is sufficiently greened. Simmer gently over the fire, and, before serving, add a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. The juice must not be added until the last moment, or the colour of the sauce will be spoilt. Time, a few minutes to press out the juice. Sufficient for half a pint of sauce. Probable cost, 4d.
A béchamel tinted and flavoured with raw parsley juice, finished with lemon at the last second. The whole point is colour, so the order of operations matters more than the quantities.
- The hinge: lemon off the heatThe hinge: lemon at the last moment -- Acid and heat together turn the green a drab olive, which is what the recipe means by the colour being "spoilt". The book says only to add it before serving; stirring it in with the pan off the burner, immediately before it goes to the table, follows that instruction.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1¼ US cups of finished béchamel. That serves four to six as a sauce for fish or vegetables.
- Parsley juice without a mortarA small blender or food processor will pulp wet parsley faster; wring the pulp in a square of muslin or a clean tea towel to get the juice. Reckon on a large bunch of flat-leaf or curly parsley, stems removed, for a couple of tablespoons of juice — enough to green a cup of sauce.
- "While wet"Not incidental, though the book does not say why. Damp leaves pulp and give up their juice more readily under the pestle; parsley pounded dry tends to yield paste rather than liquid.
- Keep the heat low"Simmer gently" here means barely trembling. The recipe gives no time for this step (its "few minutes" is for pressing out the juice), but a hard simmer will dull the colour before the lemon ever gets a chance to.
- Season at the endThe recipe assumes the béchamel is already seasoned. Taste after the lemon goes in — salt and white pepper, and no more, since anything else muddies both the colour and the parsley.
- What to serve it withThe recipe gives no serving suggestion; a sauce of this kind went with boiled or poached fish, calf's head, boiled fowl or asparagus. It does not reheat: make it as the fish comes out of the pan.
- Probable cost, 4dFourpence for a half-pint of sauce, milk and butter included, is the sort of costing Cassell's gave throughout for the benefit of the household accounts. It is a period reference point, not a shopping guide.
In Victorian English kitchens "Dutch sauce" was the usual name for what French cooks called hollandaise — an egg-and-lemon sauce — though the term drifted, and Cassell's here builds the green version on béchamel instead, a thriftier and far more forgiving base for a domestic cook. The greening itself is much older than either sauce: colouring food with the pressed juice of parsley, spinach or other herbs runs back through medieval and early modern cookery, where "green sauce" for fish was standard and cooks kept an eye on colour as carefully as on flavour. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical household reference of the later nineteenth century, is characteristic in its details: a time given for the one fiddly step, a note on exactly what will ruin the dish, and a probable cost in pence for the mistress checking the week's books.