How to make ham and parsley sauce

Poor old parsley sauce. As someone who writes regularly about old-fashioned food, it often feels that we are living through a golden revival of vintage dishes. You can’t move for cookbook concepts pinned on comfort and nostalgia, or restaurants attempting to take the diner on some kind of Proustian journey. Whether it’s nursery food, school dinners, classical bistro French cooking, hyper-regional food, or the polarising ‘reinvention’ of any of the above, old-fashioned ingredients are in vogue again. In trendy restaurants menus are littered with rabbit, offal, marmalade, boozy prunes; with steamed suet puddings (sweet and savoury), duck à l’orange, prawn cocktails, rice pudding, hand-raised pies… Ten years ago, devilled eggs were naff. Not now.

So where is the parsley sauce? A fixture of British cooking from the Middle Ages through to the 1980s, once beloved on both fish and ham, it is scarcely to be seen. If it exists anywhere, it is in the few remaining pie and mash shops in London, where it is called ‘liquor’, and traditionally made with the stewing liquid from cooking the eels.

But elsewhere it is largely overlooked. It doesn’t have the gloss of a sauce Bordelaise or the zip of the Seville orange-heavy sauce Bigarade. Perhaps the return to the old school is a return to punchy flavours, and that accounts for our failure to remember parsley sauce’s subtle charms.

I used to loathe parsley, especially the curly stuff, which is what is traditionally used in a parsley sauce. When we went on holiday to France as fussy, awkward children, my dad had to request every dish to be served ‘sans persil’ to prevent his ungrateful offspring rejecting whatever was put in front of them if there was a decorative sprig or scatter.