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Poultry (INGREDIENTS for sauce for pair)
for sauce for pair of chickens.—The liver of a fowl, 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley, 1/2 pint of melted butter INGREDIENTS for sauce for pair Liver and Parsley Sauce (for of chickens . The liver of a fowl, 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley, pint of melted butter. AVERAGE COST, 4d. .
AVERAGE COST, 4d. minutes and mince it very fine; blanch Wash and score the liver, boil it for a few or scald a small bunch of parsley, of which there should be sufficient when chopped to fill a tablespoon; add this with the minced liver to 1/2 pint of smoothly-made melted butter ; let it just boil ; when serve. minute to simmer.
LOBSTERS, TO BOIL.
The text has come through the scanner badly garbled, with the ingredient list and method interleaved, but the sauce itself is straightforward: a flour-thickened butter sauce carrying finely minced cooked liver and blanched parsley, served with a pair of boiled or roast chickens.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a sauce of butter thickened with a little flour and water, simmered smooth. Simply melting butter and stirring liver into it will give you a broken, greasy sauce.
- Half a pintThe book is working in imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. That is the finished quantity of sauce, enough for two birds.
- The liverOne chicken liver, washed, scored and boiled a few minutes until firm, then chopped as fine as you can get it. A quick chop leaves gritty lumps; work it almost to a paste with the knife, or press it through a sieve.
- ScoringCutting shallow slashes in the liver before the short boil; the book does not say why. Discard the green-stained parts near the gall bladder, which are bitter.
- Blanching the parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water and then a cold rinse sets the colour and takes the raw edge off. The book reckons a small bunch of parsley yields about the tablespoonful wanted once chopped.
- The final boil"Let it just boil" means bring it barely to the boil and take it off. Long simmering after the liver goes in turns the sauce grey and grainy.
- CostThe 4d. average cost is a price in pre-decimal pence from the period of the book and has no bearing on anything now.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, intended for a pair of chickens.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for the better part of two centuries, and cookery writers complained that it was often badly made. Its virtue was that it took additions: parsley, egg, capers, anchovy, shrimp, or as here the bird's own liver, so a single technique produced a whole family of sauces. Liver sauce for boiled fowl belongs to the thrifty logic of a household that bought birds whole with the giblets attached and expected every part to be used.