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Lemon and Liver Sauce

A sauce of liver cooked with lemon, butter, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Lemon and Liver Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the rind of the lemon or Seville orange as thinly as possible, avoiding the white pith.

  2. Cut off the remaining white pith and slice the lemon into thin rounds, then remove the seeds and cut the slices into small squares.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the lemon squares and a little finely minced peel to the prepared liver in melted butter.

  2. Warm the mixture together without boiling.

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. Tarragon + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Lemon + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Tarragon + white winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together409 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon or seville orange
Supplies sharp acidity and aromatic peel oils that brighten the rich liver.
Liver
Forms the body of the sauce, giving it a rich, savoury flavour and soft texture.
Butter
Melts to add fat, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture without boiling. Liver is delicate and boiling can toughen its proteins and cause the butter emulsion to break, leaving the sauce grainy and greasy.

“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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