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Fowl Liver, Garnish
Take the livers from four fowls; let them be quite sound, and of a good colour. Blanch them in boiling water, and then stew in gravy; add a bunch of thyme, parsley, pepper, and salt, half a tea-spoonful of each, with a small glass of white wine. When they have stewed a quarter of an hour, dry and use as a garnish. Time to blanch, ten minutes.
A component recipe rather than a dish: cooked livers to be set around a roast or boiled fowl, or chopped for a sauce. The chief thing to reconsider is the total cooking time.
- The timing is the problemTen minutes' blanching followed by fifteen minutes' stewing leaves chicken livers grey and chalky. Modern practice is a brief poach or sear until the centre is just set and faintly pink-brown, three to four minutes for a whole liver, then rest before use.
- "Gravy" here means stockIn Victorian usage gravy is the strong, unthickened brown broth kept in the kitchen, not a flour-bound sauce. Use a good chicken or veal stock; the livers are lifted out and dried, so the liquid is only a cooking medium.
- A small glass of white wineRoughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Nineteenth-century wine glasses were considerably smaller than present ones, so err low rather than high.
- "Quite sound, and of a good colour"This is instruction, not flourish. Reject livers with green or yellow staining from a broken gall bladder, which is bitter enough to spoil the batch, and trim away any connective tissue or dark clotted patches.
- The half-teaspoonThe measure most plausibly applies to the pepper and salt, the thyme and parsley being the bunch, which would be lifted out. Half a teaspoon of salt is ample for so small a quantity of liquid.
- QuantityFour fowl livers amount to only a few ounces in all; three or four modern chicken livers fall in the same range. Enough to garnish one roast bird or to chop into a sauce for it.
- Drying mattersPat the livers thoroughly dry on a cloth or paper before arranging them. Wet livers weep into the dish and dull the surface of whatever they garnish.
- DonenessPoultry liver should be cooked through to the centre rather than served rare; a just-set, uniformly opaque interior is the target.
A garnish was a standing item of kitchen technique: the trained cook kept a repertoire of small cooked components — livers, cockscombs, quenelles, glazed onions, fried croutons — to dress the border of a made dish. Fowl livers came with any bird bought whole and undrawn, and a household plucking its own poultry had giblets to use up; the liver, being the most delicate of them, was often reserved for garnish or for pounding into a sauce, while the gizzard and neck went to the stockpot. Blanching first was a common nineteenth-century practice, intended to firm the flesh and draw off blood so the pieces would hold their shape and colour on the dish, which may help explain a cooking time that looks punishing today. As birds came increasingly to market ready-dressed through the twentieth century, the giblet garnish faded, though its descendants survive in chopped-liver stuffings and in the liver-thickened sauces of French poultry cookery.