Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Butter Sauce with Parsley
Butter Sauce with Parsley
Place in a stewpan over the fire six ounces of butter, let it melt, and remove from fire; let it settle for five minutes, pouring off the clear into another pan, warm it up, mix in a little salt and finely-chopped parsley, and serve hot in a sauceboat.
Caper Sauce (for Boiled Mutton.) Make two pints of melted butter, and stir into it two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice, four tablespoonfuls of large, capers, and two tablespoonfuls of essence of anchovy.
Caper Sauce (for Fish.) Make one pint of melted butter, into which place a small piece of glaze, and when the sauce is ready for serving stir into it two tablespoonfuls of choice capers, salt and pepper to suit the taste, also putting in one tablespoonful of essence of anchovies.
Three sauces run together in one entry, and they use two different techniques under confusingly similar names. Sort that out first and the rest is quick work.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn the caper sauces, melted butter is the standard Anglo-American sauce of the period: butter thickened with flour and water or light stock, the ancestor of a thin white sauce. Proportions vary a good deal from cookbook to cookbook; butter and flour cooked together (on the order of an ounce or two of flour to a pint) and then whisked into a pint of hot water or fish stock, simmered a few minutes and seasoned, gives the right body. Simply melting butter will not give you anything that holds capers in suspension.
- The parsley sauce is clarified butterThe first sauce is different: 6 oz butter melted, rested, and the clear fat poured off the milk solids. That is about 3/4 cup butter yielding a scant 2/3 cup clarified. Let it stand off the heat undisturbed or the sediment will swirl back up.
- Scale the mutton sauce downTwo pints is a very large quantity of sauce, enough for a boiled leg at a full table. For four, make half a pint of the base and use 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp capers and 1 1/2 tsp anchovy essence.
- Essence of anchovyA thin bottled anchovy extract, once sold everywhere and now scarce. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water is the closest substitute; use about two-thirds the volume, as the paste is saltier and thicker. Worcestershire sauce will give the savoury note but also vinegar and spice the original did not intend.
- GlazeGlace de viande or fish glaze: stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A teaspoon-sized piece is plenty in a pint. Commercial demi-glace or stock concentrate works; add it before the capers so it dissolves fully.
- Capers"Large" presumably means one of the coarser grades and "choice" one of the finer ones, nonpareil-sized or near it; the terms were loose. Drain brined capers and rinse if the sauce is already carrying anchovy, or the whole thing turns aggressively salty. Add them at the end so they stay whole.
- Salt lastAnchovy essence, glaze and caper brine are all salt sources. Season only after all three are in.
- Holding the sauceA flour-thickened butter sauce keeps over hot water for half an hour; clarified butter with parsley separates and looks greasy if it sits. Chop the parsley and combine it just before the sauceboat goes out.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium rather than a personal manuscript, and the plain English sauces sit in it beside elaborate French work. "Melted butter" was so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British and American cooking that it was sometimes called the national sauce of England, usually with disdain from French-trained cooks; caper sauce with boiled mutton was one of its fixed partnerships, as unquestioned as apple with pork. The anchovy essence in both caper versions is a survival from the eighteenth-century English kitchen, where anchovy was the standard way to put depth into a pale sauce long before commercial bouillon existed. The parsley sauce here is simpler still: clarified butter with a herb.