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Melted Butter or Parsley Sauce
Miss A. C.
One tablespoon of butter, one teaspoon of flour, rubbed together, one tablespoon chopped parsley, first boiled five minutes in water and squeezed out ; two teaspoons water; shake over a clear fire, one way, until it boils; add the parsley gradually.
This is the English "melted butter" — not simply butter melted in a pan, but a flour-thickened butter sauce, here turned into parsley sauce for boiled fish or vegetables. The proportions as printed need scrutiny before you start.
- The liquid is almost certainly a misprintThe liquid looks like a misprint -- Two teaspoons of water will not carry a tablespoon of butter and a teaspoon of flour into a sauce; it will give you a paste. Other period recipes for melted butter commonly call for a teacup (roughly 4 fl oz) of water or fish liquor to a comparable quantity of butter and flour, though proportions vary. Treat the printed figure as unreliable and add liquid until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Rubbed together means beurre maniéRubbed together means a cold butter-and-flour paste -- Butter and flour worked together raw, then brought up with the water in the pan. It thickens as it comes to the boil, and the sauce needs to reach a boil to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Shake, do not stirThe instruction to shake the pan "one way" is old kitchen lore about keeping melted butter from oiling — turning greasy and separated. The substance behind it is real: this sauce breaks if it is over-agitated or held too long over high heat. Keep the fire moderate and use it as soon as it thickens.
- Five minutes is too long for parsleyBlanching sets the green and takes the raw edge off, but five minutes at a boil dulls the colour and the flavour. Thirty to sixty seconds in salted water, then a squeeze in a cloth, does the same job better.
- A clear fireA coal or wood range burned down to steady, smokeless heat, free of fresh fuel. In practice, keep it moderate.
- Add the parsley lastStirring it in gradually after the sauce has boiled keeps it bright. Parsley boiled again in the finished sauce turns olive-drab.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of British and North American cooking for most of the nineteenth century: flour, butter, water, salt, and whatever was added to give it a name — parsley for boiled fish or new potatoes, capers for mutton, eggs for salt cod. French-trained cooks were scathing about it, and the often-repeated jibe that English kitchens knew only one sauce under twenty aliases stuck to it, but it survives in the parsley sauce still served with ham and fish today. Its appearance here, credited only to "Miss A. C.", reflects the character of The Home Cook Book, a collection contributed by Toronto women in the 1870s — initials, terse phrasing, doubtful quantities and all.