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Parsley Sauce
The excellence of this sauce depends greatly upon the parsley-leaves being chopped very small. Take a handful of fresh parsley, if procurable. Wash it, pick off the leaves, and boil them quickly in salt and water for three minutes. Drain them well, and mince them as finely as possible, then stir them into half a pint of well-made melted butter or white sauce, and serve immediately. If preferred, the parsley may be boiled for ten minutes, then chopped small, bruised, put into a tureen, and the sauce poured over it. A little cold butter, broken into small pieces, should then be stirred, until it is melted, into the hot sauce, which must not be served immediately. It is always best to send parsley sauce to table in a tureen instead of pouring it over the meat. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 4d. (See also MAITRE D'HOTEL SAUCE.)
A short entry that hides one large assumption: the "melted butter" it calls for is not butter melted in a pan but a Victorian flour-thickened butter sauce. Get that right and the rest is straightforward.
- "Well-made melted butter"In English cookery of this period melted butter means a white roux sauce — roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or milk, cooked out and seasoned. Plain melted butter will simply pool and split around the parsley.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. The recipe gives no yield, but that is likely enough sauce for four or so alongside boiled fish, ham, or a boiled fowl.
- Blanch, then dry, then chopThe three-minute boil sets the colour and takes the raw edge off. Drain hard and pat the leaves dry before mincing, or you will chop them into green mush and thin the sauce with parsley water.
- Take the first method, not the secondParsley leaves go olive-drab and lose their scent well before the ten minutes of the alternative boil; three is ample.
- "Chopped very small" is the hingeCassell's is right that everything depends on it. Use a large sharp knife and a dry board, and cut rather than pound — a food processor bruises the leaves and turns the sauce grey-green.
- The cold butter finishStirring cold butter into the hot sauce off the heat is the technique now called mounting, and it gives gloss and body. It must be done away from the boil or the emulsion breaks.
- An ambiguity in the text"Which must not be served immediately" contradicts the first method and may be a printer's slip. Treat the sauce as one to serve at once, kept warm over hot water rather than over direct heat.
- Parsley varietyA Victorian handful was most likely curly parsley, the standard English garden sort, which holds its shape in a sauce. Flat-leaf works but is softer.
- CostThe entry gives the probable cost as fourpence, cheap for a boat of sauce; "if procurable" suggests fresh parsley was not always to be had.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and parsley sauce is its most enduring descendant: the same flour-and-butter base with blanched, finely minced parsley stirred through at the last moment. It belonged to boiled food — salt cod and other boiled white fish, boiled bacon and ham, boiled rabbit or fowl, broad beans — dishes that needed lubrication and a little sharpness rather than reduction and depth. The entry reads as much like a lesson as a recipe: the insistence on fine chopping, on brief boiling, and on sending the sauce to table in a tureen rather than over the meat. The cross-reference to maître d'hôtel sauce points to a related parsley-and-butter idea, usually flavoured with lemon.