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Liver and Lemon Sauce

A sauce made from boiled fowl liver, lemon rind, and butter, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Liver and Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the liver of the fowl and boil it for a few minutes.

  2. Peel the lemon very thin, reserving the white part and seeds, and cut it into small slices.

  3. Mince the liver and a small amount of lemon rind finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the minced liver and lemon rind to the drawn butter.

  2. Season with salt and add the sliced lemon.

  3. Heat gradually without boiling to prevent the butter from separating.

Serve

  1. Serve with poultry.

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

Fowl liver
Provides the main savoury body and rich flavour of the sauce once minced into the butter.
Drawn butter
Forms the fat base of the sauce, carrying flavour and giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma, with the thin rind contributing fragrant oils to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat gradually without boiling. Butter is an emulsion of fat and water; high heat or boiling can break it, causing the fat to separate and the sauce to look greasy and curdled.

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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