parsley sauce
+ nostalgia power
Such a gentle soul I imagine — if parsley could talk, you know? Its leaves fairy-wing thin and everywhere like a head of curls.
And isn’t it odd that coriander – another dainty herb – tastes like soap for some people? No, really. It’s genetic. And then my brain reminded me that parsley is persil in french, but Persil is a witchgrade-green laundry liquid, and actually, the Witchcraft Act was only repealed in the 1950s, the same decade my Dad was born.
*
Growing up I’d have parsley sauce most weeks, always handmade by mon père. I’ll have to ask him when he learnt how to make it, try and do some sums on all the stirs + roux + sprinkled greens over a lifetime.
I didn’t really realise you could have fish without it until I was seven or so. The same way I didn’t find out about the holy pairing of battered fish dunked in mayo until I was thirteen — just as my girlhood was finally giving out to teenagedom: the new path beckoning.
A welcome send-off in my opinion.
Around a fortnight ago, we were having dinner at my parents and Mum asked if the little one would like parsley sauce with his fishfingers? Dad’s made some.
It had been a decade – more even – since I’d eaten Dad’s parsley sauce. So I said why not, waiting happily for it to be served, closing the loop on my fishy coming-of-age story — my son beginning his. But I remembered:
Oh, it’s got milk in hasn’t it?
For a while now I’ve been off milk, like a good, upstanding millennial. You see here – yes there – where my face is all puffy? It just didn’t seem to be going down that well.
The cruelty is I’d apparently drink two pints a day when I was small: a fridge-high fridge-raider.
Maybe I’d drunk my quota.
Maybe the cows wanted their reparations.
I spent the next few months darting between exotic cartons and muddy-looking teas: almond-hemp-brownrice-oat-soya. I began to feel a bit better.
*
Round the corner from my Grandad’s, there was a little factory for washing used milk bottles — because, they were all glass back in the day. We’d be on the way home after dropping him his copy of The Sun and a packet of Golden Virginia, and I’d watch the cratefuls trundle out on rollers, glinting. Off they’d go to the dairy from there, possibly; at the very least to a tanker on an industrial estate, to be filled and delivered by the milkman the following day.
Yes.
Yes. You didn’t even need to leave the house for milk. It would be there before you’d boiled the kettle in the morning. Cold from its night outside. Clink, clink.
It’s so easy to be nostalgic nowadays, thinking of times when things were easier. But I’ve begun to wonder whether that’s just because we could count our years on two hands, and things should be simpler and easier when you’ve spent less than a decade walking upon Earth.
Was it romantic then, that we all once adored milk so much it travelled in its own private carriages to our homes?
Is it romantic now to run out to get milk late in the evening? Bowling back inside through the front door like a character in a film, red cheeked and windswept, only to wrestle with a paper lid and cover the worktop in white puddles? Oh, for f***—
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Cows used to be everywhere too, didn't they? Or am I just getting carried away? On bottles and pots smiling at us, dotted across fields... I used to think Friesian cows were my favourite. Only this morning I saw a lady with a fluffy black and white cow-print hat, and you know what? It looked so good. But then I’d see Jersey cows with their smooth terracotta coats, their enormous eyelashes and I would soon be freshly wooed…
…mooed?
:)
*
Back at my parents, I was staring down the parsley sauce. Wondering if I had some, would I wake up tomorrow with a face like an udder? I lowered my fork to skim the surface, the little memory pool on my plate, and Dad said: I’m sure it’ll be okay.
Maybe, in small doses, the best placebo we can all take is nostalgia, because: did you guess?
I was fine.
🐄🥛