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Liver and Lemon Sauce (for Poultry)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for a pair of fowls. The liver of a fowl, 1 lemon, salt to taste, pint of melted butter.
AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Wash the liver and let it boil for a few minutes; peel the lemon very thin, remove small dice; mince the liver and a small quanthe white part and pips and cut it into very tity of the lemon-rind very fine; add these ingredients to pint of smoothly-made melted butter; season with a little salt, put in the cut lemon, heat it gradually, but do not allow it to boil, lest the butter should oil.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer
A Victorian liver sauce for roast fowl, built on "melted butter" — which in Mrs Beeton means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Get that base right and the rest is assembly.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn this book melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour worked together, then water or light stock added and stirred until smooth, not butter melted in a pan. Proportions vary between the book's own melted-butter recipes, so work from the base recipe rather than assuming a ratio. Plain melted butter will not hold together when the liver and lemon go in.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge of the recipe. Once the sauce is enriched and the lemon flesh is added, hold it below a simmer; boiling breaks the emulsion so the fat separates out, which is what the original means by the butter "oiling."
- Quantity of sauceThe fraction before "pint" has been lost in this text, in both the ingredient list and the method. Half a pint is a plausible reading for a pair of fowls and gives a workable consistency, but the original quantity cannot be confirmed from this page.
- Cooking the liverA chicken liver poached whole firms up enough to mince in a few minutes; judge it by cooking it right through to the centre rather than by the clock. Longer and it turns grainy and chalky, which shows badly in a pale sauce.
- The lemonPare the zest thinly with no white pith, then mince a small amount of it very fine — a teaspoon is plenty, as boiled rind turns bitter in quantity. Cut the peeled flesh into small dice, discarding pips and membrane.
- Yield and servingRoughly half a pint, if that is the intended quantity: enough to accompany two roast fowls. Send it to table hot in a sauceboat; it will not hold well, so make it while the birds rest.
- Cost noteThe "4d." is the average cost given in the book for the whole quantity, and is of historical interest only.
Liver sauce belongs to the thrifty logic of Victorian roasting: the giblets came with the bird, and the liver was too good to waste. Beeton's kitchen treated the fowl's liver three ways — mashed into stuffing, pounded into a gravy, or minced into a sauce like this one — while the neck, gizzard and heart went to the giblet stock. The lemon does double duty, cutting the richness of the flour-and-butter base and standing in for the sharpness that a modern cook might get from wine or vinegar. "Melted butter" as a named preparation is one of the sauces most likely to confuse a reader coming to these books fresh: it appears constantly through the nineteenth century as the plain English answer to French white sauces, and it disappeared from household use largely because the roux base was thought coarse by the time Escoffier's vocabulary took hold in English kitchens.