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Sauce

Lemon Sauce for Boiled Fowls

A sauce made from lemon, fowl liver, and hot melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Sauce for Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare off the rind of the lemon and cut it into slices.

  2. Remove the kernels and cut the lemon into small square bits.

  3. Blanch the liver of the fowl and chop it fine.

Assemble the sauce

  1. Mix the lemon and liver together in a sauceboat.

  2. Pour on some hot melted butter and stir it up.

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. Lemon + livertop 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

Lemon
Provides the sharp acidity and fresh aroma that cut through the richness of the butter.
Fowl liver
Adds savoury body and depth to the sauce once blanched and finely chopped.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel when melted and stirred through the sauce.

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.

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