Home › The Principles of Cookery › Calf's Liver and Tomatoes
Calf's Liver and Tomatoes
Cut a calf's liver into pieces about half an inch thick and three inches long. Put a piece of butter into a pan; when boiling add two small onions and a tea-spoonful of parsley, both chopped very finely; dip each piece of liver in this and slightly cook. Take them out, egg and bread-crumb them, then plunge them into boiling fat, and fry a nice golden brown. Dish up with tomato sauce. THE SAUCE.--Scald four tomatoes and skin them; cut into thin slices, put into a saucepan with a little butter, salt, and cayenne, and cook till the tomatoes are quite tender.
A two-stage treatment of liver — a brief turn in seasoned butter, then crumbed and deep-fried — that only works if the liver stays pink inside. Everything else is timing.
- Don't cook it twice throughThe first pass in the butter and onion is meant only to set the surface and pick up flavour, perhaps 30 seconds a side over decent heat. The deep-frying is what cooks it, and calf's liver is done at 2–3 minutes in the fat, still faintly rosy at the centre. Liver taken past that turns grainy and metallic.
- Frying fat and temperature"Boiling fat" means fat hot enough that a crumb sizzles briskly, roughly 350-375F. The original would most likely have used lard or dripping; any neutral oil with a high smoke point works.
- Egg and bread-crumb themStandard Victorian shorthand for dip in beaten egg, then coat in fine dried white crumbs. Pat the liver dry after its butter bath or the egg will slide off. Chilling the crumbed pieces for 15 minutes helps the coating hold in the fryer.
- Calf's liver specificallyVeal liver is milder and finer-grained than ox or lamb liver, and it is what the thin-cut, quick-fried treatment assumes. Butchers sell it sliced; ask for slices a good half-inch thick rather than the paper-thin cuts sold for pan-frying, or the interior will overcook before the crumbs colour.
- The onion and parsleyTwo small onions chopped very finely will catch and burn in hot butter. Keep the heat moderate and let them soften first, then raise it for the liver.
- The tomato sauceScald means 20–30 seconds in boiling water to loosen the skins. Four medium tomatoes cooked down in butter gives a loose, fresh sauce rather than a reduction — 10 to 15 minutes. Winter tomatoes are thin; a tin of good plum tomatoes, drained and chopped, is closer to the intent than a pale fresh one.
- CayenneCayenne here reads as a seasoning rather than a heat source: in recipes of this kind a pinch is intended, enough to sharpen the tomatoes. Taste as you go.
- YieldA whole calf's liver is a great deal of meat. About 1½ lb, cut as directed, serves four with the sauce and a plain vegetable.
Calf's liver sat well above ox liver in the Victorian hierarchy - delicate enough for a luncheon dish, cheap enough to belong in a household dictionary rather than a chef's book. The technique is French in outline: a brief turn in butter with chopped onion and parsley, then pané à l'anglaise and deep-fried, a treatment English cookery books of the period took over from French practice. The tomato sauce is the more telling detail. Tomatoes were still a comparatively novel ingredient in British domestic cooking when this dictionary was compiled, with the Channel Islands trade only beginning to build at that date, and they appear in period recipes alongside rich or strongly flavoured meats, where their acidity does something of the work vinegar or lemon had done before.