Season a calf's liver with salt and pepper; put a few slices of bacon in a saucepan; let get very hot. Add the liver, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 2 bay-leaves and 2 sprigs of thyme minced fine; cover and let brown a few minutes. Then add 1 glass of sherry wine, salt and pepper and sprinkle with flour. Let simmer ten minutes. Serve hot with potatoes.
A short braise of calf's liver with bacon, aromatics and fortified wine. The recipe assumes a whole lobe and gives no weights, so the main work of translation is deciding on a cut and controlling the cooking time.
- The hinge: do not overcookLiver turns grainy and metallic the moment it goes past faintly rosy in the centre. Ten minutes of simmering suits liver cut into slices about half an inch thick, not a whole lobe, which would need far longer and be ruined by the time it was through.
- Buy the right liverCalf's (veal) liver is milder and finer-grained than beef and is what this recipe wants. A whole liver runs to several pounds; for four people buy about 1 1/2 lb, sliced, and have the butcher peel off the outer membrane and any large tubes.
- "1 glass of sherry"Genuinely ambiguous. A wineglassful was usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz in cookbooks of the period, though the term was used loosely; treat it as no more than 1/2 cup. A dry or medium sherry works; cream sherry will make the sauce cloying.
- The baconBacon of the period was generally more heavily salt-cured, and often fattier, than most supermarket bacon. Use a few slices of thick-cut or slab bacon, render it slowly first, and hold back on added salt until the sauce is made.
- Mincing the vegetablesThe onion, carrot, thyme and bay are a fine-cut mirepoix meant to melt into the sauce rather than be served as vegetables. Fresh thyme sprigs and whole bay leaves can be added intact and fished out instead, if you prefer a cleaner sauce.
- Sprinkling with flourA tablespoon or so. The recipe adds the sherry first and sprinkles the flour after; if you would rather avoid a pasty taste, scatter the flour over the fat before the wine and let it cook a minute. Either way, whisk in a splash of stock if lumps form.
- Pan and liquidA wide heavy sauté pan is better than a deep saucepan here, since the liver should sear rather than steam. If the pan looks dry after the wine reduces, add a few tablespoons of stock or water.
- Yield and servingMakes about four servings at the quantities suggested above. The recipe says only to serve with potatoes; boiled or mashed both suit. Rest the slices a minute off the heat and spoon the sauce over at the table.
Calf's liver has always sat higher in French cooking than in English or American, and foie de veau appears in nineteenth-century French kitchens in a dozen guises: sautéed with vinegar and onions, larded and roasted, or braised with wine as here. The "à la bourguignonne" tag usually signals the Burgundian trio of red wine, bacon and small onions, so the sherry in this version is an anomaly — either an Americanised substitution or a compiler's loose hand with regional labels, both common in the day-a-dish books that flourished around 1900. Those books promised a housewife a full year of dinners without repetition, and they leaned on national names to supply variety, sometimes attaching a French or Spanish heading to a dish that would have puzzled a cook in either country. What survives intact here is the sound technique: fat rendered from bacon, aromatics browned with the meat, a splash of wine, a dusting of flour to bind, all of it done in one pan in under half an hour.