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Parsley Juice (for Colouring various Dishes)
Procure some nice young parsley; wash it and dry it thoroughly in a cloth; pound the leaves in a mortar till all the juice is extracted, and put the juice in a teacup or small jar; place this in a saucepan of boiling water, and warm it on the bain-marie principle just long enough to PARSLEY. take off its rawness; let it drain, and it will be ready for colouring.
A working preparation rather than a dish: a natural green colouring for sauces, butters and forcemeats, made before bottled food dye was a kitchen staple. The whole method turns on gentle heat.
- The hinge: warm, never boilThe juice is set over hot water only long enough to lose its raw taste. Push it too far and the green matter coagulates coarsely and the colour dulls towards grey-brown.
- What "drain" means hereAs the warmed juice sets, the green solids separate from the watery liquid. Pour the whole lot through muslin or a coffee filter; the deep green paste caught in the cloth is the colouring, and the pale liquid is discarded.
- Mortar or machineA blender or food processor with a splash of water extracts far more juice than pounding, and a nut-milk bag or clean tea towel will wring it out. Dry the parsley first as instructed — surplus water dilutes the colour.
- QuantityThe original gives none. A large bunch of leaves picked from the stalks yields only a spoonful or two of green paste; the amounts are a matter of judgement, so tint by eye to the colour you want.
- Which parsleyFlat-leaf is usually reckoned to give a stronger, cleaner green than curly, and "nice young" matters: coarse late-season leaves can be bitter and yellowish.
- Bain-marieHere it means simply a cup or jar standing in a pan of hot water, not a specialised vessel. Any heatproof bowl over a saucepan does the same job.
- KeepingThere is no preservative here and the colour fades fast. Use it within a day, or freeze it in a small quantity; the flavour survives freezing better than the brightness does.
- The stray word"PARSLEY." mid-sentence is the printed page header caught by the transcription, not an instruction.
Before aniline food colours were cheap and general, a professional kitchen kept its own palette: spinach or parsley for green, cochineal for red, saffron or egg yolk for yellow, burnt sugar for brown. The green was much used, to tint ravigote and green butter, to mark herb sauces as herb sauces, and to give forcemeats and aspics a spring colour they would not otherwise have. French practice is often associated with spinach, blanched and pressed to a paste called vert d'\ley carries its own flavour, which suited English herb sauces. That a household book of this scale devotes an entry to extracting juice from parsley says something about expectations of how a dish should look on the table \an an afterthought.