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Chicken Liver Sauce
Take two livers, wash and boil in salted water until they are tender. Drain and chop them into moderate-sized pieces, put them in one pint of melted butter with two tablespoonfuls each of catsup and pickle vinegar, add pepper and salt to taste; give it a boil up and it is ready for serving.
A giblet sauce of the old school: an accompaniment for roast fowl or boiled poultry rather than a dish in itself. Two points need attention before you start, the quantity of butter and what the book means by catsup.
- The butter is the problemA full pint (2 cups) of melted butter for two livers is a sauce boat of fat with a few solids in it. Half a cup to a cup, whisked in off the heat, gives something a modern table will actually eat.
- "Two livers"The title tells you these are chicken livers, perhaps 2 oz for the pair. If you are saucing a whole roast bird for four or more, use six to eight livers and scale the seasonings with them.
- Catsup did not mean tomatoCatsup did not necessarily mean tomato -- In the 1890s catsup might be mushroom or walnut as well as tomato: a thin, dark, salty condiment closer to Worcestershire than to modern ketchup. The recipe does not say which is meant. Mushroom ketchup is still sold and is a plausible reading; tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweeter.
- Pickle vinegarThe liquor from a jar of pickles, usually spiced cucumber or mixed pickle. Two tablespoons of the brine straight from the jar does the job; plain cider vinegar is a thinner substitute and will want a pinch of allspice or mustard seed.
- Do not boil the livers tenderDo not boil the livers hard -- Chicken livers need only a few minutes in barely simmering salted water; held longer they turn chalky and grainy, and no amount of butter will bring them back. Cook them through until no pink remains at the centre.
- The final "boil up"Bring it just to the point of bubbling and take it off. Held at a boil, a pint of butter with vinegar in it will separate and leave you with greasy liver in broken fat.
- YieldAs written, roughly a pint and a quarter of sauce, enough for a large roast fowl. At the reduced butter quantity, proportionately less.
Oscar Tschirky, the ma"eetre d'h"f4tel who lent his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling a working reference for a hotel kitchen and for the ambitious home cook trying to imitate one, which is why sauces like this appear in bare, unglamorous shorthand. Liver and giblet sauces are much older than the Waldorf: English and American cookery had long treated the pluck of a roasting bird as too good to waste, chopping the boiled liver into melted butter, gravy or a b"e9chamel to be poured back over the bird. The catsup-and-pickle-vinegar seasoning is the tell of the period, when bottled condiments of mushroom, walnut and tomato were widely available, and they seem to have served much the same purpose as soy or Worcestershire do now, putting a sharp, savoury edge on something rich.