Substitute for
Sometimes in the middle of winter, parsley-leaves are not to be had, when the following will be found an excellent substitute: -Tie up a little parsleyseed in a small piece of muslin, and boil it for 10 minutes in a small quantity of water; use this water to make the melted butter with, and throw into it a little boiled spinach, minced rather fine, which will have an appearance similar to that of parsley.
This is a wartime-thrifty trick for green parsley sauce out of season: parsley flavour from the seed, parsley colour from spinach. It works, but almost every element of it needs translating.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a puddleIn the cookery of this period melted butter means the standard English white sauce: butter worked with a little flour and thinned with liquid (here the parsley-seed water), then simmered until smooth. It is not butter that has simply been melted.
- Use culinary parsley seed onlySeed sold for the garden is frequently treated with fungicide and is not food. Buy parsley seed from a spice supplier, where it is sold as a whole spice.
- Quantities are left to youA "little" seed in a "small quantity" of water reads as about 1 teaspoon of seed to a cup of water. Parsley seed is markedly stronger and more bitter than the leaf, so start below that and taste the infusion before you build the sauce on it.
- The muslin bag mattersThe seed is meant to flavour the water and then leave. Tie it loosely so water circulates, and lift it out before making the sauce, or you will be picking grit out of the finished dish.
- Ten minutes is right for the seedTen minutes for the seed -- unlike leaf parsley, which loses its aroma to long boiling, the seed needs a sustained simmer to give up much flavour, which is presumably what the ten minutes is for.
- The spinach is colour, not flavourBoil or wilt a small handful, squeeze it very dry, and chop it as fine as you can before stirring it in at the end. Wet spinach will thin the sauce and streak it grey-green.
- Whether it is worth doingFlat-leaf parsley is now in shops year-round, and frozen chopped parsley holds its flavour far better than dried. Treat this as a page about seasonal scarcity rather than a first-choice method.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the nineteenth-century English kitchen -- served with fish, boiled fowl, vegetables and puddings -- and parsley sauce was its most common variation, which is why a household book would bother finding a winter substitute at all. Before glasshouse growing and long-distance freight, fresh herbs genuinely disappeared for months in northern Britain, and cooks worked around the gap with dried and seed forms of what they could not pick. Colouring a sauce green with sieved or minced spinach was among the shifts available to them, though how widely it was practised is uncertain.