Parsley Sauce
1 T lemon juice 3 T butter 1 T chopped parsley 12 t salt Mix lemon juice with the melted butter and parsley. Then add salt.
A three-ingredient melted butter sauce of the kind church cookbooks printed in shorthand, assuming the cook already knew what to do with it. The only real difficulty is reading the abbreviations.
- The abbreviationsT is a tablespoon and t a teaspoon in this book's notation. So: 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 3 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley.
- That "12 t salt"Almost certainly a fraction that lost its slash in typesetting — 1/2 teaspoon. Twelve teaspoons of salt in three tablespoons of butter would be inedible, so read it as a half teaspoon and adjust to taste.
- Melt, don't brownThe hinge of the recipe. Take the butter just to liquid over low heat, off the heat before it foams and colors; browned milk solids turn the sauce nutty and muddy the lemon and parsley.
- Order of operationsAdd the lemon juice to butter that has cooled slightly; it combines more evenly than with butter straight off the heat.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly both work; chop it fine and dry, and add it last so it stays green rather than stewing in the hot fat.
- Yield and useAbout 1/4 cup — enough for two to four servings. It is a finishing sauce for poached or broiled fish, boiled new potatoes, carrots, or asparagus, spooned over at the table.
- It will not holdMelted butter sauces separate as they sit and set solid when chilled. Make it in the last two minutes before serving, or beat the same ingredients into softened butter and use it as a pat instead.
This is essentially maître d'hôtel butter in liquid form — the lemon-parsley-butter combination that French cookery treats as a basic finish for grilled fish and meat. Fundraising cookbooks of this kind collected contributions from members and printed them at whatever length the contributor wrote them, rarely explaining a technique the average housekeeper was assumed to know; that may be why a sauce like this arrives with no pan size, no heat level, and no serving suggestion.