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Lemon and Liver Sauce for Fowls
Wash and score the liver of the fowl, and boil it for five minutes; drain it, and pound it in a mortar with two or three spoonfuls of good gravy. Pare off the thin outer rind of a lemon, and mince it finely; remove the thick white skin, cut the pulp into small pieces, mix with it a tea-spoonful of the minced rind, add half a tea-spoonful of salt, and stir this and the liver into half a pint of good melted butter. Make the sauce hot over the fire, but it must not boil, for fear the butter should oil. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
LEMON AND ORANGE CANDIED RINGS FOR GARNISHING. (See ORANGE AND LEMON CANDIED RINGS.)
A Victorian sauce for roast or boiled fowl, built on the bird's own liver. Two phrases will mislead a modern reader: "melted butter" and "good gravy."
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books melted butter means a thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon or two of butter, let down with water or light stock and simmered until smooth, with more butter beaten in. Plain melted butter will split the moment it warms, which is exactly what the recipe warns against.
- Half a pintCassell's is using the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups of finished sauce.
- "Good gravy"Not thickened roast gravy but a strong meat or poultry stock, reduced. Two or three spoonfuls of well-reduced chicken stock does the job; the liver only needs enough liquid to pound smooth.
- Cook the liver throughFive minutes at a true boil will cook a single chicken liver, but check it: cut through the thickest part and look for firm, uniformly brown flesh with no soft red centre. The sauce is then held below simmer, so it will not finish the job for you.
- ScoringThe recipe simply says to wash and score the liver; scoring presumably helps it cook through quickly in the five minutes allowed. Trim away any greenish bile-stained patch and the connective tissue at the lobes first — bile is bitter and will carry through the whole sauce.
- The lemonPare the zest with no white attached, mince it fine, then segment the flesh and cut away membrane and pips before dicing. Only a teaspoonful of the minced rind goes in; the rest is surplus, so zest a small lemon or expect leftovers.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge. Above a simmer the emulsion breaks and the butter separates into oil. Warm it in a wide pan over low heat, or in a bowl over hot water, stirring until it just steams.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, dressing a chicken for three or four. Make it while the bird rests and serve at once; it does not reheat well.
Sauces built on the giblets of the bird they accompany belong to a kitchen that wasted nothing and cooked to order; Cassell's puts the probable cost of the whole sauce at 3d. The pairing of liver and lemon with poultry is old and widespread: an Italian salsa of pounded chicken liver, and the liver-thickened sauces served with roast game in eighteenth-century English cookery, work on the same principle, the pounded liver acting as both flavouring and body. The stiff, flour-bound "melted butter" that carries it here is distinctly British, and by the time Cassell's appeared in the 1870s it had long been a target of French disdain; later French practice favoured emulsified butter sauces that need the same careful low heat this recipe insists on. The cross-reference to candied lemon rings at the end is an artefact of the dictionary format, in which entries were shelved alphabetically rather than by course.