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Parsley and Lemon Sauce
Squeeze the juice out of a lemon, remove the pips, and mince fine the pulp and rind. Wash a good handful of parsley, shake it as dry as possible, and chop it, throwing away all the stalks. Put one ounce of butter and one tablespoonful of flour in the stewpan, and stir over the fire until well mixed; then put in the parsley and minced lemon, and pour in as much clear stock as will be required to make the sauce. Season with a small quantity of pounded mace, and stir the whole over the fire for a few minutes. Beat the yolks of two eggs with two tablespoonfuls of cold stock, and move the sauce to the side of the fire, and when it has cooled a little, stir in the eggs. Stir the sauce for two minutes at the side of the fire, and it will be ready for serving.
A small egg-thickened velouté, sharpened with lemon and parsley. The whole thing hinges on the finish: once the yolks go in, the sauce must never boil.
- The hinge — no boiling after the eggsEgg yolks set into curds above roughly 180F. Pull the pan well off the heat, let it stop steaming hard, then stir the yolk-and-stock mixture in and return it only to the gentlest heat for a minute or two until it coats a spoon. "The side of the fire" on a coal range meant a spot too cool to simmer; the modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting or a bowl over hot water.
- How much stockThe recipe leaves it to judgment. One ounce of butter (2 tablespoons) and a tablespoon of flour will carry about a cup of stock to a pouring consistency; use less for a coating sauce. Clear stock means a light, well-skimmed veal or chicken stock, not a dark brown one.
- The lemon"Mince fine the pulp and rind" gives a rough, sharp sauce with real bite. Pith minced in with the rind will make the sauce bitter as it stands, so a modern cook may prefer to pare the zest off with a peeler instead. Note that the recipe squeezes the juice out at the start and never says to add it back.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg, milder and more floral than the seed itself. "Pounded" means ground; a pinch of ground mace is plenty for a cup of sauce, and a scrape of nutmeg substitutes at a pinch.
- ParsleyA good handful chopped is roughly a quarter to a half cup. Flat-leaf has more flavour, curly more colour. Drying it properly matters — wet parsley waters down the sauce and dulls the green.
- Cooking the rouxStir the butter and flour over moderate heat for a minute or two, just until it smells nutty and loses the raw-flour taste, without letting it colour. This sauce should stay pale.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for four. It belongs with boiled or poached fowl, calf's head, and plain white fish; it does not hold or reheat, so make it while the main dish rests.
Parsley-and-lemon sauces of this type belong to the long English and Anglo-American tradition of pale sauces built on stock rather than milk, served with boiled meats and poultry — the ancestral line is generally traced back through eighteenth-century "white sauce" to the medieval practice of thickening broths with egg yolks. The yolk liaison is the older technique; the flour roux is the newer French overlay, and this recipe uses both. Oscar Tschirky, who was never a chef but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, collected the kitchen's working formulas into his 1896 book, and pages like this one show how much plain British-inflected cookery still sat alongside the French repertoire in a grand American hotel. Mace, long a staple of the English spice box for exactly this kind of pale sauce, is here too.