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Fried Parsley (Cut the butter into nine)
Cut the butter into nine or ten pieces, roll into balls, and place in iced water till quite hard.
Remove from the water and dry them, then coat with egg and crumbs, pressing the crumbs well in and slightly flattening them on the board.
Repeat this four times. Take a small round cutter, dip it into hot water, and stamp the centre of the balls about half way through. Fry a golden brown in very hot fat. Remove the lid, and tip out the liquid butter from the inside. Fill up with some savoury mixture, and serve. Garnish with fried parsley.
This is not a parsley recipe at all — the heading has been taken from the last line, and what follows is a set of hollow fried cases made by melting butter out of a crumbed shell. The original assumes you already know the savoury filling and the fried parsley garnish from elsewhere in the book.
- What you actually needThe recipe gives no quantities. Butter enough to divide into nine or ten firm balls, plus beaten and strained egg, and a large bowl of fine dry white breadcrumbs, since the repeated coatings use far more crumb than you expect.
- The hinge: the butter must never softenEvery stage — rolling, each of the four coatings, the stamping — has to happen with the butter rock hard. Return the balls to iced water or the freezer between coats. A ball that has gone greasy will leak in the fat and collapse.
- Four coats is not an exaggerationRepeated coating is not an exaggeration -- The shell is the whole dish. The original coats once and then says to repeat four times, so four or five layers in all, pressed firmly so the crumbs knit into a solid wall, or the case will split the moment the butter liquefies.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "very hot fat" and gives no figure; in modern terms something around 190C/375F. Cooler fat gives the butter time to melt and force its way out before the crust sets; hotter and the crumbs blacken. Fry only two or three at a time and expect vigorous spitting if one bursts.
- The stamped lidDipping a small plain cutter in hot water and pressing halfway through scores a circle that lifts off after frying. Do this while the balls are still rock hard from the iced water, and mark the top clearly, because the lid is hard to find on a browned case.
- Draining and fillingLift the lid, pour off the melted butter, and stand the cases upside down on paper for a moment. Fill while warm with something already cooked and hot — creamed chicken, shrimp in bechamel, mushroom puree — since the shells will not survive further cooking.
- Fried parsleyVery dry, well-picked sprigs dropped into the same fat for a few seconds only, until the spitting stops and the parsley is crisp and still green. Wet parsley will erupt in hot fat.
- Yield and serviceNine or ten cases, so one or two per person for six. They must go to the table within minutes; a filled case left standing goes soft and sags.
This belongs to the savoury, the small hot salted dish served near the end of a late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, after the sweet and before dessert — a British course often said to have no real equivalent elsewhere, and the section of the cookbooks where professional cooks are traditionally held to have shown off. Hollow cases of this kind sit alongside croustades, bouchees and fried bread croutes, but the butter trick is pure kitchen conjuring: the vessel is made from the thing that disappears, and the cook's skill is invisible until the lid comes off. The book assumes the filling, the crumbs and the frying fat need no explanation. The title does not match the recipe, though why is not something the page allows us to say.