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Dutch Sauce, Green, or Hol- landaise Verte
- INGREDIENTS. -6 tablespoonfuls of Béchamel, seasoning to taste of salt and cayenne, a little parsley-green to colour, the juice of 1/2 a lemon. AVERAGE Cost, 4d.
Put the Béchamel into a saucepan with the seasoning, and bring it to a boil. Make a green colouring by pounding some parsley in a mortar, and squeezing all the juice from it. Let this just simmer, when add it to the sauce. A moment before serving, put in the lemon-juice, but not before; for otherwise the sauce would turn yellow, and its appearance be thus spoiled. "Eat with good appetite nor need Epicurean sauce." -OLD BALLAD.
ÉCLAIRS.
EEL SOUP.
A green sauce built on béchamel rather than an egg-and-butter emulsion, coloured with pressed parsley juice and sharpened with lemon at the last second. It comes together in a few minutes once the béchamel is made.
- Not a true hollandaiseDespite the name, there is no egg yolk or clarified butter here. "Dutch sauce" covered more than one preparation in Victorian English books; this one is a seasoned béchamel and will behave like one — it will not split, and it can be reheated.
- The hinge: lemon lastThe instruction to add lemon juice only a moment before serving is the whole point of the method. Acid added earlier, and then heated, dulls chlorophyll to a yellow-olive; added at the very last moment, with almost no time on the heat, it leaves the green intact.
- Parsley green, without a mortarPounding parsley and wringing out the juice through muslin gives a concentrated green liquid. A small food processor or blender with a spoonful of water does the same job; strain hard through a fine sieve or cloth so no fibre goes into the sauce.
- "Let this just simmer"The parsley juice is warmed only to take off the raw edge — brief warming below a rolling boil. Boiling it hard turns the colour drab, which defeats the purpose of making it.
- QuantitySix tablespoonfuls is roughly 90 ml by a modern spoon (period spoon sizes varied), a small sauceboat's worth to serve alongside fish, poached chicken or eggs. Scale up proportionally; the parsley juice is added to taste for colour rather than by fixed measure.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a pinch, used for warmth rather than heat. Salt the béchamel before adding the lemon, since acid makes a sauce taste sharper and can lead you to oversalt.
- "Average cost, 4d."Fourpence in pre-decimal currency. It reflects the béchamel's milk and butter, not modern prices.
Béchamel-based coloured sauces were part of the standard repertoire English cookery took over from French practice in the nineteenth century, and Mrs Beeton's books drilled them into the middle-class household as building blocks: make the mother sauce, then vary it. Green sauces of this kind were generally coloured with a vert d'épinards or parsley extract made by pounding leaves and pressing out the juice — a technique older than the book, and one that produced colour without the herb's texture. Calling it "Dutch" or "Hollandaise" reflects a period looseness of naming that predates the classifications Escoffier codified in the early twentieth century, under which hollandaise means specifically an emulsion of egg yolk and butter. The verse quoted alongside is an old ballad tag.