Home › The World's Kitchen › Parsley Sauce
Parsley Sauce
Plunge three branches well-washed parsley into one and a half gills boiling milk and boil for five minutes. Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter with one and a half tablespoons flour and cook for half minute. Strain the parsley water into this pan and stir until it comes to a boil, add half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and a teaspoon vinegar, add to sauce with three-quarters of an ounce butter, briskly mix one minute, pour into a sauce bowl and use as directed.
A small French-style butter-and-flour sauce finished with an egg-yolk liaison, sized for one meal rather than a batch. The measurements are all in pre-standard tableware units.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is three-quarters of a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of salt is three-quarters of a teaspoon, and two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive by modern taste. Season to half that and adjust.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolkOnce the diluted yolk goes in, the sauce must be off the heat or barely warm. A minute of brisk mixing is enough to thicken and gloss it; a return to the boil will scramble the yolk and break the sauce into grains.
- "Parsley water" means the milkNothing is discarded. Straining the boiled milk off the parsley branches gives the infused liquid; five minutes at a boil will have reduced it somewhat, so top it back up towards three-quarters of a cup with plain milk if needed.
- Butter weightsThree-quarters of an ounce of butter is about one and a half tablespoons. The earlier "one tablespoon melted butter" with one and a half tablespoons flour makes a stiff roux by current ratios; equal volumes of butter and flour will behave more predictably.
- Half a minute for the rouxThat is a white roux, cooked only long enough to lose the raw-flour smell without colouring. Keep the heat moderate.
- Branches, not sprigsThree branches means three whole stalks with their heads, stems included; the stems carry a good deal of the aroma. Bruise them before they go into the milk.
- The vinegarA teaspoon in this quantity is a seasoning, not a pickle; it sharpens the sauce. Use a mild white wine vinegar rather than distilled.
- YieldSomething under a cup, which will serve a small table alongside poached fish, boiled fowl or steamed potatoes. It does not reheat well once the yolk is in, so make it last.
Parsley sauce sits at the junction of two traditions: the plain English butter-and-parsley sauce poured over boiled fish, ham and new potatoes, and the French method of building a white sauce on a roux and finishing it with a liaison of egg yolk, cream and an acid. This version follows the second -- the parsley is used twice, once as an infusion in the milk and once chopped raw at the end, so the sauce carries both a cooked background note and a fresh green one. Saltspoon measures and weights given in ounces are common in English-language cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both curled and flat-leaf parsley were available by then, and either suits the infusion.