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Persillade Sauce (Parsley Sauce)
2. to 4 tablespoons chopped parsley 1 cup medium or thin white sauce Add parsley to white sauce.
A two-line finishing sauce that depends entirely on the white sauce beneath it. Everything worth knowing is in the roux ratio and the moment the parsley goes in.
- White sauce, thinThe entry does not give proportions, but the standard ones of the period are about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until lightly thickened. Use this for spooning over poached fish or steamed vegetables.
- White sauce, mediumConventionally 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk, though this entry does not specify. This is the version to use if the sauce must cling to a fillet or bind a dish of flaked fish.
- Cook the flour firstLet the butter and flour bubble together for a minute or two before the milk goes in, or the finished sauce tastes pasty. It should smell faintly of biscuit, not brown.
- Add the parsley lastStir it in off the heat, or as close to serving as possible. Held hot in the sauce it dulls toward olive and loses its fresh green flavour.
- Chop, do not minceFlat-leaf or curly both work. Chop coarsely and dry the parsley well after washing; wet parsley thins the sauce and clumps.
- Season at the endThe original assumes the white sauce was salted. Taste after the parsley is in, and add salt, white pepper and a few drops of lemon juice if the sauce is going to fish.
- YieldAbout 1 cup, enough for four servings of fish or vegetables. It does not reheat well; make it as the fish comes out of the pan.
In French kitchen usage persillade normally means chopped parsley worked with garlic, rubbed onto meat or scattered over potatoes at the end of cooking, rather than a sauce in its own right. American cookbooks borrowed the word for the far simpler idea of parsley stirred into a milk-and-flour white sauce, the workhorse behind a great deal of period cooking: creamed fish, creamed eggs, creamed chicken, boiled vegetables. Books of this kind taught the basic white sauce once, in graded proportions -- this entry itself refers to 'medium or thin' -- then generated a whole chapter of named sauces by adding one thing to it.