Home › Meats › Broiled Calf's Liver, With Bacon
Broiled Calf's Liver, With Bacon
Wash and cut the liver in thin slices; broil over a brisk fire, with thin slices of breakfast bacon. Season with butter, salt and pepper.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know how liver behaves. The whole dish turns on cutting thin and cooking fast.
- The hinge: do not overcookCalf's liver slices cut 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick need roughly 1 to 2 minutes a side over high heat, until the surface is browned and the centre still faintly pink. Past that point it turns grainy and dry, which is why so many people believe they dislike liver.
- "A brisk fire"A hot bed of coals or, indoors, a heavy cast-iron pan or ridged grill pan preheated until a drop of water skitters. A domestic broiler set on high with the rack close to the element also works; the point is intense radiant heat, not gentle cooking.
- "Breakfast bacon"Ordinary thin-sliced streaky bacon, as distinct from the thicker, saltier flitch or gammon cuts of the period; modern supermarket bacon is close to what the book means. The recipe broils the two together, but it is easier to cook the bacon first, separately, and keep it warm than to time it alongside the liver.
- Trim the membraneThe recipe says only to wash. Pull off the thin outer membrane from each slice before cooking or it contracts on the heat and curls the meat away from the pan.
- Soaking, optionalSoaking liver in milk or salted water to mellow the flavour is an old and widely repeated practice. Calf's liver is mild enough that this is unnecessary, though it does no harm; pat completely dry before it meets the heat.
- "Season with butter"Butter goes on at the end, off the heat, as a finish rather than a cooking fat, since it would burn at broiling temperature. A knob melted over the hot slices with the salt and pepper is the sauce. Salt after cooking, not before, to keep the surface dry enough to brown.
- YieldAllow roughly 5 to 6 oz of liver and two rashers per person; a pound of liver with six or so rashers of bacon serves three.
- SourcingCalf's liver is paler, finer and considerably milder than beef liver, and is usually a butcher's order rather than a shelf item. Beef liver substitutes but is stronger and coarser; lamb's liver is the closer match in texture.
Liver and bacon belongs to the long British and American tradition of pairing an inexpensive offal with a salted, fatty pork to supply what the lean organ meat lacks, and it appears in American cookbooks as an ordinary breakfast and supper dish rather than anything special. Calf's liver was the aristocrat of the family, generally priced above beef liver and valued for its mildness, which may be why a book aimed at middle-class households treats it with so little ceremony: three sentences, no sauce, no garnish. Liver was also commonly recommended as a strengthening food for the anaemic and the convalescent, well before the B vitamins responsible could be named, and that reputation kept it on the table long after other offal had begun to slip out of fashion.