Mojo Verde

Green sauce seems to be a concept that has travelled the world, adapting to local ingredients wherever it goes. In the Middle East, where it probably all started, particularly Yemen and Israel, they have zhug, in Italy and Spain, different salsa verdes, in France; sauce verte and in the Canary Isles they have mojo verde. On the other side of the wide sea, it reverts to salsa verde but with green chillies and tomatillos and further south in Argentina it morphs into chimichurri. They’re all fantastic and, because they’re uncooked, have that wonderful vibrant, verdant green colour. According to Wikipedia, in the Middle Ages a parsley and sage emulsion was considered to be good for the constitution and somewhere along the way we got our mint sauce – although sorrel is the traditional base for an English green sauce, to be served with fish, meat and eggs. In Germany they include eggs, in chopped hard boiled form, and call it Grüne Soße. You could write a book about it – in fact someone almost certainly will. You’d probably chose not to devote a chapter to our mint sauce.

They’d all go well with griddled or barbecued king oyster mushrooms but the one we use is more akin to a mojo verde. You can find recipes for everything on line but, unless you have Claudia Roden’s ‘Food of Spain’ or Monika Linton’s ‘Brindisa – the true food of Spain’ you might not have come across Mojo Verde.