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Lemon Sauce for Fowls
Pare off the rind, and remove the thick white skin and the pips from a fresh lemon. Cut it into dice, and put them into half a pint of good melted butter. Make the mixture thoroughly hot without bringing it to the point of boiling, and serve immediately; half a tea-spoonful of finely-minced lemon-rind is sometimes added. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A short sauce that hinges almost entirely on knowing what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter" — which is not butter that has been melted.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together and let down with water or light stock, then simmered a few minutes. The proportions vary considerably from book to book. Plain liquid butter will split and leave the lemon swimming in grease.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Cassell's yield of three or four servings assumes a sauce ladled sparingly over carved fowl.
- Do not let it boilOnce the lemon dice go in, hold the sauce below a simmer. Boiling drives off the fresh aroma and, in a flour-and-butter sauce, encourages it to break; the acid also thins the starch if held at heat.
- Preparing the lemonCutting away the pith and membrane matters more than it sounds — the white pith is bitter and the segment walls stay tough and stringy in a warm sauce. Work over a bowl and add any juice that escapes.
- The optional rindHalf a teaspoon of finely minced zest is worth adding, but pare it with a peeler before you cut into the fruit and mince it very fine. Add it at the end, off the heat, so it perfumes rather than stews.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt is essential in a flour-thickened butter sauce, and a grind of white pepper suits roast or boiled chicken.
- ServingMake it while the bird rests and send it straight to the table; the recipe says to serve immediately. It will not sit — the starch skins over and the lemon turns dull quickly.
- "Probable cost, 4d."Cassell's costed nearly every recipe in pence for household budgeting. Fourpence for a lemon and a little butter marks this as a cheap way to dress an otherwise plain fowl.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century English kitchens, so ubiquitous that Cassell's assumes any reader knows how to make it without being told. Dressing it with diced lemon belongs to the long British habit of pairing acid with boiled or roast poultry — the same instinct behind lemon stuffed into a bird's cavity or served in wedges alongside. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium issued in the late Victorian period, was aimed at the middle-class household with a cook to direct rather than a chef to consult, which is why it prices each dish and states how many it feeds. A sauce like this one, costing pennies and using ingredients already in the house, is exactly the sort of small economy the book was built to supply.