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Chicken, Sauce for Boiled
Take the livers of the fowls you are using, and boil them with a bunch of thyme and parsley; drain them, and pound them in a mortar with two boned anchovies, a little pepper and salt, and the finely-grated rind of half a lemon; add the white of one egg, and the hard-boiled yolks of two. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the mixture, and put it into a saucepan with a pint of good melted butter. Stir the sauce constantly until it is thick enough. Time, altogether, about half an hour. Sufficient for a couple of boiled chickens. Probable cost, 6d. (See also CHICKEN, MUSHROOM SAUCE FOR.)
A Victorian liver-and-anchovy sauce for poached chicken. One phrase in it means something quite different today, and getting it wrong will ruin the dish.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn English cookery of this period melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than butter simply melted. Proportions vary from book to book, but something in the region of 1 to 2 oz butter worked with about 1 oz flour and whisked with a pint of water or light stock until smooth will give the pourable sauce intended. A pint of actual melted butter would be greasy and liable to split. Make the sauce base first, then work the pounded mixture into it.
- Keep it below a simmerOnce the raw egg white and the liver purée go in, the sauce must be stirred over gentle heat only. A boil will scramble the white into threads and split the emulsion. "Thick enough" here means coating the back of a spoon, which takes a few minutes.
- A pint means 20 fl ozCassell's is British, so the pint is imperial: 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. That is generous for two chickens; scale to 1 to 1.5 US cups if you want less.
- Boned anchoviesThese were whole salt-cured anchovies, filleted and the backbone pulled out. Two oil-packed anchovy fillets are the equivalent. Rinse them if your brand is aggressively salty, and hold back the added salt until you have tasted.
- How much liverThe quantity is left to the birds — two chickens would have supplied two livers, perhaps 2 to 3 oz in total. Modern supermarket chicken livers are large, so two of them will get you there. Poach them in water with the thyme and parsley until just firm, about 5 to 6 minutes, and no longer, or they turn chalky.
- Mortar or processorA small food processor does the pounding in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — over-worked liver goes gluey. Push the mixture through a sieve afterwards if you want the smooth finish the original intends.
- YieldEnough sauce for two whole poached chickens, so roughly six to eight servings. Halve everything for a single bird.
- ServingIntended for plain boiled or poached fowl, where the sauce carries all the seasoning. It also suits poached veal or a whole poached fish. Serve it hot; it thickens further as it cools and will need loosening with a spoonful of the poaching liquid.
Boiled fowl was a staple of the Victorian invalid tray and the plain family dinner, and because the bird itself was deliberately bland, everything depended on the sauce beside it. That is why a book like Cassell's carries alternatives for the same dish — this liver-and-anchovy version, and a mushroom sauce, with others of the kind likely enough. The pairing of liver with anchovy belongs to a long English habit of using salted fish as a savoury background rather than a flavour in its own right, the same instinct that put anchovy into steak sauces, potted meats and Worcestershire-style bottled condiments. The recipe is also a piece of thrift: the livers came free with the birds, and the whole sauce is costed at sixpence. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted for decades, is generally thought to have been aimed at households running on one servant or none, where a sauce that used the giblets was worth printing.