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Bullock's Liver for Gravy
This liver may be and is used by many fried with bacon, but it is more generally used for gravy in made dishes. It is excellent for this purpose prepared in the following manner:--After well draining, lay it in a dish with salt well spread over every side; let it stay twenty-four hours, then drain, and hang it in a dry place, to use when required.
This is a dry-cure, not a cooked dish: liver is salted for a day and then hung to dry at room temperature for storage of unspecified length. That is the part that cannot be reproduced in a modern kitchen, and the reasons are specific to liver.
- No measured salt"Salt well spread over every side" gives no weight of salt relative to the weight of the liver, so there is no way to know whether the cure reaches a concentration that inhibits bacterial growth. Successful dry-curing depends on a measured percentage, not on coverage of the surface.
- Liver does not dry-cure like muscleSalt is likely to penetrate blood-rich offal unevenly, and liver holds a great deal of moisture compared with a ham or a side of bacon, so a twenty-four hour surface salting may leave the interior close to fresh.
- Ambient hanging"A dry place" in Victorian usage meant an unheated larder or cellar, cool for much of the year and ventilated. A modern kitchen or pantry sits at 18-22C, warm enough for organisms such as Salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus to multiply in an under-cured, high-moisture protein.
- No end point and no keeping limitThe instruction is to hang it "to use when required" -- no drying time, no target weight loss, no indication of how long it remains sound. Without those, there is no point at which the product can be judged safe.
- Nothing here is later cooked to safety by designThe recipe treats the dried liver as a gravy ingredient without specifying any cooking of it, and some toxins produced during storage are not reliably destroyed by brief heating even where the bacteria themselves are.
- If you want the flavourOx liver is still sold and still makes a deeply savoury gravy base when bought fresh, cooked through and used the same day. For any cured or dried offal preparation, follow a current recipe with weighed cure and specified temperatures.
Bullock's liver -- ox liver, from a mature animal rather than a calf -- was among the cheaper livers on the Victorian butcher's slab, coarse and strong-flavoured where calf's liver was delicate and dear. Its role was economic: a strong, cheap, concentrated savoury note for the brown gravies and "made dishes" that carried a great deal of nineteenth-century cooking, in the same register as bones, trimmings and glaze. Salting and air-drying was an ordinary domestic answer to keeping food before mechanical refrigeration reached private houses, and the confidence of "hang it in a dry place, to use when required" assumes a cold, ventilated larder that most readers no longer have. The practice of grating dried salted liver into sauces is largely gone from British cooking, though the underlying idea -- a cured, savoury scraping used as seasoning rather than as meat -- survives in other traditions.