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HERB SAUCE (another way)
Pick and wash the herbs. Take two bunches of parsley to one of fennel and one of mint, boil them for three or four minutes, drain and mince them finely, and stir them into half a pint of boiling melted butter. Let the sauce boil up, then pour it into a tureen, add a little salt, and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and serve immediately. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A blanched-herb sauce built on the Victorian standby known as "melted butter" — which is not simply butter melted in a pan. Getting that one term right is the difference between a sauce and a greasy puddle.
- "Melted butter" means a butter sauceIn English cookery books of this period melted butter is a thickened sauce: roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked briefly with a tablespoon of butter, then whisked smooth with water or light stock and a little more butter. Poured over plain butter, the minced herbs and lemon juice will simply separate.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That yields a generous sauceboat for two or three people, as stated.
- Bunches are not a measurementThe 2:1:1 ratio of parsley to fennel to mint is the useful instruction; the absolute quantity is guesswork. Around 2 oz of parsley leaf and stem to 1 oz each of the others gives a sauce that tastes of herbs without turning to paste.
- Fennel here means the herbThe fronds and soft stems of fennel, not the bulb sold as a vegetable. Dill fronds are the closest substitute if fennel greens are unavailable, though the anise note is lighter.
- Why blanch at allA few minutes in boiling water brightens the green and takes the raw edge off parsley stems. Drain hard and press dry — carried-over water will thin the sauce and dull it.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatThe recipe boils the sauce up after the herbs go in, then acidulates in the tureen. Keep to that order: acid stirred into a flour-thickened sauce over heat can thin it, and boiling the juice flattens its fragrance.
- ServingIntended for boiled or steamed fish, boiled fowl, or plain boiled vegetables. It sets and skins as it cools, so it goes to table the moment it is made.
- The cost note"Probable cost, 4d." is fourpence in pre-decimal currency — a scale of pricing that tells you the book was written for a household budgeting to the penny.
Cassell's belonged to the great wave of late nineteenth-century English cookery dictionaries aimed at middle-class households running a small kitchen, and its habit of giving "another way" for nearly every sauce reflects a reader expected to cook the same handful of boiled meats and fish week after week. Melted butter was the foundation of that repertoire — often described as the English answer to the French veloute, and the butt of a long-running tradition of French jokes about English sauces — and the standard method of varying it was to stir in something green, sharp or pickled. Parsley, fennel and mint were the three herbs most likely to be growing in a kitchen garden or sold cheaply in bunches at market, and the fennel-and-fish pairing in particular is long established in English cooking, fennel sauce having been served with mackerel for centuries before this book was compiled.