PARSLEY AND BUTTER

Fresh parsley
1/2 tsp. salt
Melted butter

Wash some parsley very clean, and pick it carefully leaf by leaf; put a teaspoonful of salt into half a pint of boiling water: boil the parsley about ten minutes; drain it on a sieve; mince it quite fine, and then bruise it to a pulp.

The delicacy and excellence of this elegant and innocent relish depends upon the parsley being minced very fine; put it into a sauce-boat, and mix with it, by degrees, about half a pint of good melted butter. Never pour parsley and butter over boiled things [in the kitchen], but send it up [to the dining room] in a boat.

From The Cook's Oracle by William Kitchiner, MD, New York, 1832

Comment: Kitchiner comes across in his book as either a wise, friendly, chatty fellow or the biggest know-it-all you have ever run across in your life. Every recipe, it seems, is followed by either an "Obs." (observation), "N.B." (from the Latin nota bene, loosely translated as "friendly tip"), "Mem." (presumably "memorandum"), or some combination of the above. Frequently attached are asterisks, crosses and other symbols indicating footnotes, in miniscule print, linking to anything from a citation from a cookbook of hundreds of years earlier to a popular poem of his own day, sufficiently lengthy that the footnotes alone sometimes drag on across several subsequent pages, somewhat in the same way that this footnote is threatening to do.

Ahem. To return to the recipe at hand, Kitchiner merely notes here that this same procedure can be used on chervil, basil, tarragon, burnet, or cress, as well as on parsley. All are recommended for use on boiled poultry or fish. Herbed butters can occasionally be found commercially made in gourmet food stores but at such prices that it is usually a much better idea to make them yourself.

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