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Parsley Sauce, Imitation
When parsley cannot be procured, a good imitation of it may be made by tying a tea-spoonful of parsley-seed in a little muslin, and boiling it with the water of which the sauce is to be made till the flavour has been extracted. A few spinach-leaves boiled, chopped, and stirred into the sauce will give the appearance of parsley, as the seed will impart its flavour. Time, a few minutes to boil the seed.
A winter workaround from a time before airfreighted herbs: parsley seed for the flavour, chopped spinach for the green flecks. Two details decide whether it tastes like parsley sauce or like a bitter tisane.
- Use culinary seed onlyParsley seed sold for the garden may have been treated with fungicide and is not food. Buy parsley seed from a spice merchant, or save seed from your own unsprayed plants.
- Steep, do not boil hardThe recipe allows only 'a few minutes'. A teaspoon of seed tied in muslin will give more flavour with several minutes at a bare simmer in the water that is to make the sauce; a hard rolling boil is said to drive off the volatile oil and leave the harsher, resinous note of overcooked parsley seed.
- ProportionOne teaspoon of seed suits roughly a pint (2 cups) of liquid, enough sauce for four to six. Taste the infused liquid before you build the sauce and pull the bag as soon as the flavour reads clearly.
- The sauce itselfCassell's assumes you already know the base: a roux of about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour per pint of the infused liquid, or the older "melted butter" thickened the same way. Make the infusion first, then use it as your sauce liquid.
- MuslinA doubled square of cheesecloth tied with string works, as does a stainless tea infuser. Whole seed loose in the pan is hard to strain out of a thickened sauce.
- The spinachBoil a small handful of leaves for a minute, squeeze them dry with real force, then chop very fine. Wet spinach will thin the sauce and grey it. Stir it in off the heat at the last moment so the green stays bright.
- When you have the herbFresh parsley, finely chopped and added off the heat, remains the better sauce. This is a substitution recipe, worth knowing rather than choosing.
Parsley is a biennial: sown one year, it runs to seed and dies the next, and in the British kitchen garden there were stretches of late winter and early spring when no usable leaf existed. Seed, by contrast, keeps for years in a jar and carries something of the same aromatic character, so cooks fell back on it. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is full of this kind of thrift-and-seasonality problem-solving, because a household cook was expected to produce the same dishes in February as in June.