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Liver Sauce (Chop boiled liver of rabbits)
302. Chop boiled liver of rabbits or fowls, and put it in melted butter with a very little pepper and salt, and some parsley; give it one boil and it is ready. Or, cut the livers and slices of lemon in dice, with scalded parsley and hard eggs; add salt, and mix them with butter, boil them up, and pour over fowls; also over roast-rabbits.
A short sauce built on offal that would otherwise be discarded, served with the bird or rabbit it came from. Two versions are given: a plain chopped-liver butter, and a richer one with lemon, egg and parsley.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn British cookery 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 smooth. Proportions vary from book to book, but something on the order of 1-2 oz butter and 1 oz flour to half a pint of liquid gives the right consistency. Plain molten butter will not carry the chopped liver well.
- Cook the livers firstThe recipe assumes livers already boiled, as they would be when the giblets went into the stockpot. Simmer them 8-10 minutes until firm and no longer pink at the centre, then cool before chopping; a warm liver smears rather than dices.
- "Give it one boil"This means bring it just up to the boil and take it off. Prolonged simmering makes chopped liver grainy and dulls the parsley.
- Scalded parsleyDip the parsley in boiling water for a few seconds, then drain. It fixes the colour and softens the raw edge. The recipe does not say how it is cut in the second version; chopped small suits the diced liver and lemon.
- Lemon in diceThe recipe says only to dice slices of lemon. Cutting away peel and pith first and dicing the flesh avoids bitterness, though period cooks often used the peel in such sauces.
- Hard eggsHard-boiled eggs, chopped or sieved. One or two for a half-pint of sauce; add them at the end and warm through rather than boiling hard, or the white toughens.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given. The livers of one rabbit or two fowls, about 3-4 oz, to half a pint of sauce serves four alongside the roast.
Liver sauce belongs to the older English habit of using the giblets in the dish they came from: the liver and heart were commonly simmered separately and the broth and chopped offal turned into gravy or sauce for the roast. The two variants here differ in ambition. The first is plain; the second, with diced lemon, scalded parsley and hard egg, sits close to the egg-and-lemon sauces served with boiled fowl and with fish. Rabbit was cheap and widely eaten in nineteenth-century Britain, wild or hutch-raised, and its lean roast meat suited this kind of buttery, sharp-edged accompaniment. Sauces of this sort recur in cookery books in very similar wording, and the entry reads more as a reminder than a set of instructions.