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Garnish, Fowls' Livers For
Blanch the liver of the fowl, and partly boil it. Cut the bitter part away, and mince the rest very finely. Make half a pint of good melted butter. Let it boil, then put with it the minced liver, a tea-spoonful of chopped lemon-rind, and the juice of the lemon. Where poultry is plentiful, and expense no object, three or four livers may be stewed in the savoury stock, strained, and placed whole, or in halves, round the dish. Time, a quarter of an hour to boil the liver. Sufficient, half a pint for one good-sized fowl.
A liver sauce for spooning round a boiled or roast fowl, from the era when the giblets came inside the bird as a matter of course. Two phrases carry all the difficulty: "melted butter" and "the bitter part".
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian British cookery melted butter means a plain white sauce: roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together, then whisked with about half a pint of water or light stock until it boils and thickens. Plain liquid butter will split and slide off the bird.
- The bitter partThis is the greenish patch where the gall bladder sat against the liver, and any bile-stained flesh around it. Cut it out generously before mincing; a nick of gall will make the whole half-pint inedibly bitter, and no amount of lemon will cover it.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. The recipe reckons that quantity sufficient for one good-sized fowl.
- BlanchingDrop the liver into boiling water for a minute or two, then lift it out. It firms the surface so the liver can be trimmed and chopped cleanly rather than smearing, and rinses away blood and scum.
- A quarter of an hour is too longFifteen minutes of boiling leaves a chicken liver chalky and grey. Five to eight minutes at a bare simmer takes it to firm and just cooked through, which is all a mince needs. If any pink liquid runs when cut, give it another minute.
- Adding the liverStir the mince, lemon rind and juice into the thickened sauce off the heat or at the barest simmer. The acid will thin a flour-based sauce if it is boiled hard afterwards, and the liver only toughens.
- The extravagant versionWhole poached livers set round the dish need gentler treatment than a quarter-hour boil: simmer them in the poultry stock until firm and cooked right through with no pink juices, so they still hold their shape when halved.
Liver sauce belongs to the older British habit of serving a boiled fowl with something sharp and rich poured round it, and it exists because the giblets — liver, heart, gizzard, neck — arrived with every bird from the poulterer and were expected to be used. "Melted butter" as a name for a flour-thickened butter sauce is one of the more confusing survivals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cooking; it is generally reckoned the ancestor of the workaday white sauces that followed. The aside about "where poultry is plentiful, and expense no object" is a reminder that chicken was still a comparatively costly meat in the 1870s, and that four livers meant four birds.