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Chicken, Sauce for Roast
Roast chickens are generally served with brown sauce, and bread sauce in a separate tureen. If no gravy is at hand of which brown sauce can be made, a few slices of liver may be fried with a little bacon until nicely browned, boiling water poured upon them, and strained. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 4d.
A stopgap gravy from an era when a roast produced its own drippings and a cook needed a fallback when it did not. The whole point is speed: a few slices of liver and bacon browned hard, then let down with boiling water.
- Brown sauce, 1890s senseBrown sauce, Victorian sense -- Not a bottled condiment but a meat gravy built on browned drippings or stock, sometimes thickened with a little browned flour. The entry assumes you have pan juices or stock to hand; the liver method is what to do when you do not.
- The hinge is the browningAll the colour and flavour comes from the fond left by the liver and bacon. Get real brown crust on both sides in a hot pan before the water goes in, and scrape the pan out as it deglazes. Pale liver gives pale, flat liquid.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor four servings, roughly 4 oz chicken or lamb's liver and one rasher of bacon to a scant pint of boiling water yields about a cup and a half of thin gravy. Season with salt and pepper after straining, since the bacon already contributes salt.
- Ten minutes means thinThis is not a stock. Ten minutes gives a light, brothy gravy, not a reduced one. If you want body, strain it and then reduce, or whisk in a teaspoon of flour cooked briefly in the bacon fat before adding the water.
- Cook the liver throughSlice it thin so it is fully cooked in the few minutes it spends in the pan; it is discarded at the straining stage anyway, so there is no reason to keep it pink.
- Bread sauce alongsideThe entry specifies a separate tureen, and the pairing was the usual one. Bread sauce is milk infused with onion, clove and a blade of mace, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter -- served warm, never hot enough to catch.
- "Probable cost, 4d."Fourpence in Victorian money, the book's habitual note of what a dish should set a household back. It is a marker of thrift, not a quantity.
Cassell's belongs to the great run of late nineteenth-century English household dictionaries written for mistresses instructing servants, and this entry reads exactly like a reference note rather than a set-piece recipe: here is what accompanies roast chicken, and here is what to do if the larder lets you down. The pairing of a brown gravy with bread sauce was a common English accompaniment for roast poultry and game, and bread sauce itself is generally traced to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or egg -- a technique that survived in Britain long after most of Europe abandoned it. The liver expedient, calling as it does for a few slices, points to a kitchen with more than one bird's worth of liver to hand, and using liver for gravy was ordinary economy rather than a special technique.