Home › Catsups and Sauces › Lemon Sauce (Cut three slices of lemon into)
Lemon Sauce (Cut three slices of lemon into)
Cut three slices of lemon into very small dice, and put them into drawn butter, let it come just to boiling point, and pour over boiled fowls.
A two-line finishing sauce that assumes you already know how to make drawn butter, which is the part that needs explaining.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterIn nineteenth-century American cookery drawn butter generally means a thickened butter sauce: something on the order of 2 tablespoons flour rubbed into 4 tablespoons butter, whisked with a cup of hot water or light stock until smooth, with the rest of the butter beaten in off the heat. Buckeye Cookery gives a drawn butter recipe of its own, which is presumably why none is repeated here.
- The hinge: stop at "just to boiling point"The instruction is doing real work. A flour-bound butter sauce held at a rolling boil, especially with acid in it, can thin and then separate. Bring it barely to a shiver, then pull it off.
- Slices, not juiceThree thin crosswise slices diced small means peel, pith and flesh all go in. The peel carries the aroma and the bitterness both, so cut the slices thin and dice them fine. If you want the perfume without the chew, remove the seeds and trim the outer skin before dicing.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no measure for the butter. Three slices will sit comfortably in roughly a cup of drawn butter; scale the lemon with the sauce rather than with the bird.
- "Boiled fowls"A fowl in this period is a mature laying hen, gently poached rather than hard boiled, and its pale skin and mild flesh are what the sauce is compensating for. A poached or steamed modern chicken breast, or a whole simmered chicken, takes it the same way.
- ServingSpoon it over the carved bird at the table rather than in the kitchen; held warm for long the sauce will need another whisk, and a second boil is what you are trying to avoid.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of English and American cooking through the nineteenth century, the thing that stood in for the French velouté and béchamel in kitchens with no stockpot going. Cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, Buckeye Cookery among them, print one base drawn butter and then a run of variations on it: egg sauce, parsley sauce, caper sauce, and this lemon version. All of them exist because boiled poultry and boiled fish are lean and pale and need fat and acid returned to them. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping appeared at Marysville, Ohio in 1877, growing out of an earlier Marysville church fundraising cookbook of 1876, and is thoroughly practical about this: the sauce takes three slices of lemon, a little butter and no special skill, and it turns a plainly cooked hen into something worth carving at table.