The Basque green sauce: hake steaks and clams cooked in an earthenware cazuela with garlic, olive oil, and a great deal of parsley, the sauce bound by the gelatine of the fish and the swing of the pan
Origin: Bilbao & the Basque Country, Spain
From the journey of Parsley.
Merluza en salsa verde is hake in green sauce, and in the Basque Country it is a dish by which cooks are judged. The sauce is garlic softened in olive oil, a little flour, fish stock or white wine, and chopped parsley, which gives it both its colour and its name. What turns that into a sauce rather than a broth is the fish. Hake, and above all the gelatinous throat of the fish that the Basques call kokotxa, gives up gelatine into the pan, and when the earthenware cazuela is swung gently back and forth over a low flame, the oil, stock, and gelatine come together into a pale, glossy, green-flecked coating. It is the same movement that makes bacalao al pil-pil, and a Basque cook does it by hand, without a whisk. Salsa verde is one of the four classical sauces of the Basque kitchen, with the black of squid ink, the red of the dried choricero pepper, and the pale emulsion of pil-pil. It is also, rather characteristically, credited to a named person. A letter of May 1723 in which a Bilbao woman, Plácida de Larrea, describes hake stewed in a clay dish with abundant parsley, clams, and asparagus from Tudela is widely quoted as the first record of the dish. The story is repeated far more often than the letter is cited, and it is best treated as tradition rather than record. What is not in doubt is that by the twentieth century the dish was on every Basque table, and that San Sebastián's merluza a la koxkera, with peas, asparagus, and hard-boiled egg, grew out of it. The Basques took their parsley with them. Tens of thousands emigrated to the River Plate in the nineteenth century, and the parsley sauce of the Argentine grill, chimichurri, most probably takes its name from the Basque tximitxurri, a hotchpotch.
Hake is the classic fish; cod or monkfish steaks also work, though they give less gelatine and a thinner sauce. Never let the sauce boil hard once the fish is in: the emulsion breaks and the hake flakes apart. With peas, asparagus, and quartered hard-boiled eggs added at the end, the dish becomes merluza a la koxkera, in the style of the fishermen's quarter of San Sebastián.
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