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Parsley and Butter
324. Boil parsley-leaves and chop very fine; then mix with melted butter, and boil.
Another. When no parsley leaves are to be had, tie up a little parsley seed in a bit of clean muslin, and boil it a few minutes in some water. Use this water to melt the butter; and throw into it a little boiled spinach minced, to look like parsley
Two versions of the standard English parsley sauce, the second a winter substitute from the days before year-round herbs. The first needs almost nothing explained; the second needs to be read carefully.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: butter worked with a little flour and thinned with water or milk, then simmered until smooth. Plain butter melted in a pan will simply split when boiled. Roughly 2 oz butter, 1 level tablespoon flour and half a pint of liquid gives the classic consistency.
- Boil the parsley separately and brieflyA minute or two in salted water sets the colour; longer turns it olive and flat. Drain hard, press dry, then chop, or the water will thin the sauce.
- Add the parsley at the endThe instruction to "boil" after mixing should be read as bringing the sauce back to a bare simmer to bind it. Sustained boiling with the herb in it destroys both the colour and the fresh flavour that is the whole point.
- Parsley seedBuy seed sold as a culinary spice rather than garden seed, which may be treated for sowing. A small quantity tied in muslin and simmered a few minutes, as the recipe directs, gives a bitter, aromatic infusion rather than anything like the flavour of the fresh leaf.
- The spinach is cosmeticIt is there only to supply green flecks so the sauce looks like the real thing. A very small amount, squeezed bone dry and chopped fine, or it will make the sauce watery and taste of spinach.
- Quantity and useThe proportions above serve four to six over poached fish, boiled fowl, broad beans, carrots or boiled bacon. Season with salt and a squeeze of lemon; the original assumes the cook knows to do this.
Parsley sauce was one of the fixed points of the English kitchen, and "melted butter" the mother sauce from which a dozen others were made by adding capers, eggs, shrimps or herbs. The second half of this entry is a reminder of how seasonal the herb supply was: parsley is a biennial that runs to seed and dies back, and before glasshouses and imports a cook in midwinter might have nothing green but stored root vegetables and whatever seed was left in the drawer. Colouring the sauce with minced spinach so it would pass for the leaf version belongs to a long tradition of kitchen substitution for appearance's sake, of a piece with the mock turtle, mock cream and mock brawn found elsewhere in books of this era.