Parsley Sauce
Cook together a tablespoonful each of butter and flour, or a cup of chicken broth and a teaspoonful of minced parsley. Simmer five minutes, add another tablespoonful of butter, season and serve with boiled chicken.
A short white sauce built on broth rather than milk, of the type usually called velouté. The printed text has a typographical fault worth sorting out before you start.
- The garbled "or"As printed, the instruction reads "a tablespoonful each of butter and flour, or a cup of chicken broth" — almost certainly a compositor's error for "and" or "add." Cook the butter and flour together, then whisk in the broth.
- Proportions and yieldOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a thin pouring sauce, about a cup, enough for four servings of boiled chicken. For a sauce that coats, use a tablespoon and a half of each.
- Cook the roux, do not colour itTwo to three minutes over low heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste. This sauce should stay pale ivory; browning the flour darkens the sauce and muddies the parsley.
- Add the broth off the boilWhisk warm broth into the roux a little at a time. Cold liquid dumped in at once is the usual cause of lumps; a warm addition and steady whisking prevents them without straining.
- The parsley goes in lateThe original adds it at the start, and five minutes of simmering will dull it to olive-grey. Stir in the minced parsley in the last minute so it stays green and tastes of parsley rather than of hay.
- The second spoon of butterThis is the finishing step that matters. Take the pan off the heat, drop in the cold butter and swirl until it disappears — over direct heat it separates and the sauce turns greasy rather than glossy.
- Seasoning"Season" here means salt, white pepper and, if the broth is thin, a squeeze of lemon. Taste after the broth has reduced, since commercial stock is far saltier than the homemade chicken broth this recipe assumes.
Parsley sauce belongs to the family of simple flour-thickened sauces that English and American cookery took from French practice in the nineteenth century and reduced to a household formula: fat, flour, liquid, one flavouring. Built on milk it is the parsley sauce served with boiled ham or fish; built on the cooking broth, as here, it becomes the standard accompaniment to boiled fowl, using the pot liquor so nothing is wasted. Boiled fowl was the usual fate of an older, tougher hen, and a sauce of this kind did the double duty of moistening dry breast meat and putting some colour on a very plain plate.