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Braised Calf's Liver
Wipe liver and skewer into shape, if necessary. Draw small lardoons through the liver, in parallel rows, leaving each lardoon extend one-half inch above surface. Place liver in a casserole or Dutch oven, surround with remnants of lardoons. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dredge with flour. Surround with one-third cup each of carrots, onion and celery, cut in small cubes; add one-half teaspoon peppercorns, six cloves, one spray parsley, a bit of bay leaf and two cups hot Brown Stock or water. Cover closely and cook in a slow oven two hours. Remove cover the last half hour of cooking that liver may brown richly. Remove liver to serving platter, set aside in a warm place. Strain liquor in casserole and use for making a Brown Sauce. Pour sauce around liver and serve. Braised liver may be served cold, thinly sliced. 1½ cups steamed or boiled rice.
A larded, oven-braised whole calf's liver in the French manner, from a book that assumed a larding needle in every drawer. Two details need translating before you start: the vessel and the oven.
- "Casserole" here means a potIn 1913 a casserole was the covered earthenware or enamelled vessel itself, not the baked dish. Use a heavy lidded Dutch oven just large enough to hold the liver, so the two cups of stock come part way up it.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a 'slow oven' of the period is usually read as somewhere around 275-325F. The point is a bare tremble in the liquid for two hours, not a simmer. The uncovered final half hour browns the top; leave the temperature where it is rather than raising it.
- LardoonsStrips of firm pork back fat or fat salt pork, cut about a quarter inch square and drawn through the meat with a larding needle. Calf's liver is very lean and dries to a grainy paste without them. If you have no needle, pierce channels with a thin sharp knife and push the strips through; blanching salt pork briefly first removes the harshest salt.
- Size and yieldNo weight is given. A whole calf's liver would commonly run something like 3 to 4 lb, which is the scale the two cups of stock seem pitched at. A smaller piece will want proportionally less liquid and less time; judge it rather than following the two hours blindly.
- Brown Stock and Brown SauceBrown Stock is a beef stock made from browned meat and bones. The Brown Sauce is the usual brown roux slackened with the strained braising liquor, then simmered and skimmed. Strain out the peppercorns, cloves and bay before saucing.
- The two-hour questionLiver seared in a pan is ruined by long cooking, but this is a different dish. Braised whole and larded, it goes past the rubbery stage into something sliceable and close-textured, more terrine than steak. Do not treat the two hours as a slip of the pen, and do not pull it at medium-rare expecting the same result.
- The trailing rice lineAlmost certainly '1 1/2 cups steamed or boiled rice,' and it reads as an accompaniment rather than an ingredient of the braise. Serve it alongside, under the sauce.
- Serving coldThe closing suggestion is worth taking. Chilled overnight in a little of its liquor, the liver slices thin and clean and eats like a coarse pâté with mustard and bread.
Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners (1913), compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller, set out a year of full Sunday menus for a middle-class household, and this dish shows how thoroughly French method had entered that kitchen. Braising a whole larded liver with a mirepoix of carrot, onion and celery, a bouquet of parsley and bay, and a finishing brown sauce belongs to the professional repertoire that was being domesticated for English-language readers in these years. Organ meat carried none of the apology it later acquired, and calf's liver - scarcer and milder than beef liver - was a dish fit for a Sunday table. The larding is the older layer of the recipe: threading fat through lean muscle is a long-established solution to meat that carries none of its own, and it survived in household books after the needle for it had become less common equipment.