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Parsley Juice, for Colouring Sauces, Etc
Pick a quantity of young parsley-leaves from the stalks, wash and dry them well, and pound them in a mortar. Press the juice from them into a jar, and place this in a saucepan of boiling water. Let it simmer gently until it is warm, when it is ready for use. The juice of spinach-leaves, as well as that of parsley, is used for colouring. It is prepared in the same way. Time, three or four minutes to simmer the juice.
A working preparation rather than a dish: a concentrated green extract for tinting sauces, butters and forcemeats. The whole technique rests on keeping the heat low.
- Never let it boilThe green comes from chlorophyll carried with the leaf protein, and hard boiling is generally said to dull it towards olive. Hold the jar in the water bath at a bare simmer for the three or four minutes the recipe allows, and no longer.
- "A quantity" of parsleyThe book gives no measure. A large bunch of picked leaves will yield only a small quantity of juice, so gather more than seems necessary.
- Mortar or machineA food processor or blender does the pounding faster, but needs a splash of cold water to get the blades biting. Pound or blend, then wring the pulp hard in a doubled square of muslin or a clean cloth; a fine sieve alone will not extract much.
- Dry the leaves properlyWater clinging to the leaves dilutes the extract and weakens the colour. Spin or pat them thoroughly dry before pounding, as the original insists.
- Flat-leaf against curlyEither will serve. Curly parsley is the more fibrous and will need harder wringing.
- Spinach behaves the sameSpinach juice, mentioned here as an alternative, gives more liquid for its weight and a deeper colour with little flavour of its own. The recipe says it is prepared in exactly the same way.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative here and no sterilisation. Cover and refrigerate, use within two days, or freeze in an ice-cube tray. The colour fades noticeably after the first day.
- Adding it to a sauceStir the juice in off the heat, at the very end. Anything reheated to a boil after colouring loses the green the extract was made for.
Before synthetic food dyes reached domestic kitchens, cooks made their colours from the larder: cochineal for red, saffron or egg yolk for yellow, burnt sugar for brown, and parsley or spinach for green. The green extract is the household version of what French professional kitchens knew as vert d'épinards, a spinach-leaf colouring generally traced to the grande cuisine of the early nineteenth century, where it tinted ravigote and green butters. It is less a recipe than a component, assumed to be made in advance and kept to hand.