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Liver and Parsley Sauce
Take the liver of a fowl or rabbit--be careful that it is perfectly fresh--wash it, and boil it for five minutes in a quarter of a pint of water. Mince it very finely, pound it in a mortar, and mix with it a table-spoonful of scalded and chopped parsley. Stir both into a quarter of a pint of good melted butter. Let the sauce remain on the fire until it is quite hot, but it must not boil. Time, one minute to heat the sauce. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A giblet sauce built on the Victorian "melted butter," which is not what the name suggests to a modern cook. Get that one substitution right and the rest is straightforward.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery melted butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not plain liquid butter. Proportions vary from book to book, but the method is butter worked with flour and let down with about 5 fl oz of water or light stock until smooth and glossy. Pouring plain liquid butter over minced liver will give you an oily paste, not a sauce.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz or about 150 ml — a generous half cup, both for the poaching water and for the finished sauce base.
- Do not let it boilThe hinge of the recipe. Once the pounded liver is stirred in, the sauce is held below a simmer; boiling makes the liver grainy and can split the emulsion. Bring it to steaming only.
- Liver quantityA fowl's liver is perhaps an ounce, which is a light seasoning for a quarter pint of sauce; a rabbit's liver is appreciably larger. Two or three chicken livers give a sauce with more presence, and are easier to buy than a single one.
- Poach until firmFive minutes at a gentle simmer will cook a small liver through — it should be uniformly firm and no longer pink at the centre. Larger supermarket chicken livers may want seven or eight.
- Scalded parsleyDip the parsley in boiling water for a few seconds, then drain and squeeze dry before chopping. This sets the colour and takes the raw edge off; it is not a long blanching.
- Mortar or machineA small food processor or the flat of a knife on a board will do the pounding. The aim is a smooth paste, not visible fragments of liver.
- Yield and servingRather more than the quarter pint of base once the liver and parsley are stirred in, enough to sauce a boiled fowl or a rabbit for five or six, as the original states. The recipe specifies no seasoning; salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon at the end are a modern addition.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a flour-thickened butter base that took whatever flavouring the dinner required, from capers to anchovy to oysters. This version belongs to a family of giblet sauces whose logic appears to be thrift: when a fowl or rabbit was dressed at home, the liver came with it. The liver-and-parsley combination would suit pale meat that needed something with body behind it, though the recipe itself does not say what it accompanied. The costing of 2d. is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households where the price of a sauce was worth printing.