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Green Sauce, for Boiled Chicken
Take a tea-cupful of spinach-juice, add the juice of one lemon, two yolks of eggs beaten up, and a tea-spoonful of sugar. Just heat up, but do not let it boil, and serve.
This is a lemon-and-egg sauce coloured and flavoured with spinach — closer to a savoury sabayon than to the herb-based green sauces of the same name. It stands or falls on heat control.
- Never let it boilTwo yolks in a cup of acidic liquid will scramble the moment the mixture reaches a simmer. Cook it in a bowl over barely steaming water, stirring constantly, and pull it off when it coats the spoon — around 75-80C/170-175F. If it does break, a stick blender will sometimes bring it back.
- A tea-cupfulIn Victorian usage a teacup is roughly 5-6 fl oz, so read this as about two-thirds of a cup of spinach juice. Combined with the lemon it gives enough liquid to keep the yolks from setting too fast.
- Getting spinach juicePeriod practice was generally to pound raw spinach and press it through a cloth, though the recipe itself does not say. Modern equivalent: blitz about 250-300 g of washed spinach with a splash of water and strain hard through muslin. A juicer works too; check bottled green juices for added sweetening before using one.
- ColourRaw spinach juice is bright, but heat dulls it and the lemon acid dulls it further. Add the juice off the heat at the very end if you want the colour to stay vivid, and serve immediately rather than holding it warm.
- Season itNo salt is called for; the recipe leaves seasoning to the cook. It needs a good pinch of salt and white pepper, and the teaspoon of sugar reads as a counter to the lemon rather than an attempt to make the sauce sweet.
- YieldMakes roughly 250 ml — enough for four servings alongside a poached chicken. It does not reheat; make it while the bird rests.
"Green sauce" covered a wide family of dishes in English cookery books, most of them herb-based descendants of the medieval sauce verte, which is generally said to have been made from parsley, sorrel and vinegar and served with fish or fowl. This version belongs to a different tradition: the French kitchen practice of making a vert d'épinards, a concentrated spinach extract used purely as a natural colouring, which by the later nineteenth century had migrated into all sorts of green butters, purées and sauces. The pairing with boiled chicken is period logic: plain boiled fowl was standard invalid and family food, deliberately bland, and the sauce was where the interest was meant to live.