Skip to main content
Main

Lemon and Liver Sauce for Fowls

A sauce made from boiled fowl liver, lemon pulp, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon and Liver Sauce for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash and score the liver of the fowl, then boil it for 5 minutes.

  2. Drain the liver and pound it in a mortar with 2-3 tablespoons of good gravy.

Prepare the lemon

  1. Pare off the thin outer rind of the lemon and mince it finely.

  2. Remove the thick white skin from the lemon, cut the pulp into small pieces.

  3. Mix the lemon pulp with 1 teaspoon of the minced rind and ½ teaspoon of salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir this mixture and the pounded liver into ½ pint of melted butter.

  2. Heat the sauce over low heat, ensuring it does not boil to prevent the butter from separating.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Liver + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Liver + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together768 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Liver of fowl
Provides the main body and savoury flavour of the sauce once pounded smooth.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma, with the rind and pulp both used.
Good melted butter
Forms the fat base that carries the liver and lemon and gives the sauce its richness.
Good gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth while helping to bind the pounded liver.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce over low heat without boiling. Boiling a butter-based sauce can cause the emulsion to break, so the butter separates and the sauce turns greasy and grainy. Gentle heat keeps the fat and liquids combined.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, butter):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes