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Hanover Sauce
Place the boiled liver of a chicken in a mortar and pound it, then mix with it the juice of half a lemon, one breakfast cupful of cream, and salt and pepper to taste; stir the sauce over the fire in a saucepan until it is on the point of boiling, then move it to the side and let it simmer for a minute or two. Serve while hot.
A liver-thickened cream sauce of the kind that once accompanied roast or boiled poultry. It is quick, but two things decide whether it works: how finely the liver is broken down, and how you handle acid in hot cream.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe takes the sauce only to the point of boiling before moving it to the side to simmer briefly. Cream that boils hard after lemon juice has gone in can break, and the pounded liver will turn grainy, so keep the simmer very gentle.
- Add the lemon lastStirring the juice into cold cream, then heating, invites curdling. Warm the cream and liver together, take the pan off direct heat, then stir in the lemon and taste.
- A breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is usually reckoned at somewhere around 8 to 10 fluid ounces, though period books are not consistent. One standard cup is a fair reading; the sauce will be thin either way, as it is meant to be poured rather than spooned.
- Mortar or blenderA mortar gives a paste that is still faintly granular. A small food processor or immersion blender does it faster, and pushing the finished sauce through a fine sieve will make it smoother still, though the recipe does not call for it.
- The liverOne chicken liver is a very small amount of thickening for a cup of cream. Two or three livers, simmered until firm and no longer pink at the centre, give a sauce with body and a clearer flavour.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce a roast chicken for four. It does not reheat well; make it while the bird rests.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catalogues the standing repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchen, and sauces built on pounded liver were part of the classical French grounding that large American hotels drew on. The technique is old: before roux and cornstarch dominated, cooks thickened and enriched sauces with pounded organ meat, as in the Rouennaise served with duck. Names like Hanover attached themselves loosely to dishes with a German or Hanoverian association, real or assumed, and the connection here is traditional rather than documented; nineteenth-century menu French was full of such geographical labels applied more for tone than for provenance. What the recipe does show plainly is a hotel kitchen's thrift, turning the single liver from a boiled fowl into a sauce for the same bird.