Line a large baking-dish with pie-dough. Have ready ½ pound of calf's liver chopped, and ½ pound of fresh pork chopped fine. Season highly and mix with ½ cup of butter, 2 green peppers, 1 onion chopped and ½ can of chopped mushrooms. Moisten with a glass of sherry. Fill the dish with the mixture and cover with the dough. Let bake until done and serve hot.
A rich liver-and-pork forcemeat baked in a double crust. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no pastry quantity, so the numbers below fill the gaps a 1910s cook would have supplied from habit.
- The hinge: cook it through, not to deathGround pork and liver need an internal temperature of 160F at the centre of the filling. Bake at 375F for about 55-70 minutes in a 9-inch deep dish; check with a probe through the steam vent rather than guessing at "until done."
- Pastry quantityA "large baking-dish" lined and covered takes roughly a double-crust batch: about 2½ cups flour to 1 cup fat. A short lard or butter pastry suits this better than a flaky one, since the filling is wet.
- A glass of sherryPeriod cookbooks generally reckon a wine glass at about 2 fluid ounces and a tumbler at about 8, but the recipe says only "a glass," so anything from 2 to 4 fl oz is a defensible reading. A dry sherry will suit the filling better than a sweet cream one.
- Half a can of mushroomsCanned mushrooms of the period came in more than one size, commonly in the 4 to 8 ounce range, so half a can is perhaps 2 to 4 ounces drained. Fresh mushrooms, sauteed dry until they stop weeping, give a better result and less liquid in the crust; allow roughly twice the weight in fresh to match drained canned.
- Half a cup of butterThat is 4 ounces against a pound of meat, which is generous even for the era. Use it to sweat the onion and peppers first, and hold back half if your pork is not lean, or the filling will render out into the pastry.
- Season highlyThe instruction is doing real work here: liver needs it. Reckon on 1½ teaspoons salt, plenty of black pepper, and something warm from the period repertoire such as allspice, mace, thyme or a little cayenne.
- Green peppersThese are sweet bell peppers, not chillies. Two whole peppers, chopped and softened in the butter, will otherwise stay crunchy and watery in the finished pie.
- Soggy bottomBlind-bake the lower crust 12-15 minutes at 400F before filling, and cut two or three vents in the lid. The mixture is wet with butter, sherry and mushroom liquor, and an unbaked base will not set.
- YieldAbout a pound of meat plus vegetables serves six as a main course, or eight cut small. It slices far better after 15 minutes' rest, and is good cold the next day.
This book is one of a number of American compilations that offered a dish a day for a year, each pinned to a country, in the early twentieth century, at a time when "foreign cookery" was becoming a respectable middle-class enthusiasm. The national labels in such books were often decorative rather than researched, and this one looks like a case in point: a butter-enriched liver and pork forcemeat under a double crust, moistened with sherry, sits closer to the French and English raised-pie tradition than to anything Egyptian, and the pork would rule it out of most Egyptian kitchens. What the title signals is the era's appetite for an exotic name attached to a familiar technique. The underlying dish is old: chopped liver bound with fatty pork is the basis of pate en croute across Europe, and calf's liver was a more everyday butcher's purchase then than it is now.