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Lemon Sauce (Cut three slices of lemon into)
Cut three slices of lemon into very small dice, and put them into drawn butter, let it come just to boiling point, and pour over boiled fowls.
A two-line finishing sauce that assumes you already know what drawn butter is — the assumption does most of the work here.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterDrawn butter is usually not just melted butter -- In most 19th-century American books drawn butter is a cooked sauce: butter and flour worked together (a common proportion is roughly 2 tbsp butter to 1 tbsp flour), then whisked into about a cup of hot water or light stock and simmered a minute or two until it thickens, with more butter beaten in off the heat. Some English usage does mean simply melted butter, but that with lemon gives a thinner, greasier result than the thickened sauce implies.
- "Just to boiling point"This is the hinge. Drawn butter carries a good deal of emulsified fat and will separate into oil and floury liquid if it holds a real boil. Bring it to the first tremble and pull it off.
- Three slices of lemonAssume a medium lemon cut crosswise about 1/4 inch thick — a scant 2 tbsp of diced flesh, plus its juice. Cut away the peel and white pith before dicing or the pith will turn the sauce bitter as it heats.
- YieldAbout one cup if the drawn butter is made to the proportions above, enough for a boiled fowl serving four to six. The recipe itself gives no quantities.
- "Boiled fowls"A fowl was an older laying hen, poached long and slowly. A modern poached chicken breast or a whole 4–5 lb bird gently simmered stands in for it; the sauce is bland-poultry insurance and works equally on poached fish.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt the drawn butter before the lemon goes in, taste after, and add a grating of nutmeg or a little of the fowl's poaching liquor if it needs body.
Drawn butter was a backbone sauce of the English and American kitchen through the 1800s — the plain flour-and-butter liaison that stood in for the French velouté in households with no stockpot always on the fire. Cookbooks of the period often print it once and then refer back to it, adding capers for mutton, egg for fish, parsley for almost anything, and here lemon for boiled poultry. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s from Southern contributors, groups it among catsups and sauces. The lemon here does the same job acid does in any poached-meat sauce: boiled fowl is mild to the point of blankness, and a sharp, buttery cover was the standard remedy.