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Lemon Sauce for Boiled Fowls
Peel a large lemon, cut it in slices. pick out all the pips and cut each slice into small pieces. Boil a fowl's liver, then chop and add it to the lemon, pour one-half pint of hot melted butter over, and serve it in a sauceboat with the fowl.
A short sauce of the old English school, and the whole thing hinges on a term that has changed meaning: "melted butter" in a book of this vintage is not simply butter melted in a pan.
- "Melted butter" means butter sauceIn nineteenth- and early twentieth-century usage, melted butter generally means a thin butter sauce rather than butter simply liquefied: butter and flour cooked together in roughly equal small amounts, loosened with water or light stock and finished with more butter, though proportions vary from book to book. Butter merely melted in a pan will pool around the lemon and liver instead of carrying them.
- Half a pintOne cup, 8 fl oz.
- Preparing the lemonPeel is best taken to mean removing the pith as well as the zest, otherwise the sauce turns bitter. Slice, pick out every pip, then chop the flesh small.
- The liverA chicken liver, simmered in salted water until firm all the way through — about 8 to 10 minutes — then cooled and chopped fine. Old poultry came with the giblets attached; today buy livers separately, and trim off any green-stained portion, which is bile and will be bitter.
- Do not let it boil after assemblingAdd the lemon and liver to the hot sauce off the heat. Reboiling once the butter and acid are in can make the sauce oil out or turn grainy.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate, and the sauce needs salt to read as anything but bland.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for a 4 to 5 lb boiled fowl serving four to six. Serve it hot in a warmed sauceboat; it thickens and separates as it cools.
Boiled fowl was standard English and American table fare well into the twentieth century — a mature bird, too tough to roast, gently poached with vegetables — and it was usually served with a sauce, since the meat itself was mild to the point of blankness. Egg sauce, parsley sauce, celery sauce and this lemon-and-liver version all appear in the same family of cookbooks, and all are built on the same foundation of flour-thickened "melted butter." Using the bird's own liver in the sauce is often explained as a thrifty habit from an era when a fowl arrived whole with its giblets, and nothing was wasted. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, is a reminder that a great hotel kitchen of the period drew on plain domestic cookery as readily as on the French repertoire; the volume runs to more than nine hundred pages and collects a great many such household standbys alongside the dining-room set pieces.