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Liver and Bacon
Cut half a pound of bacon into thin rashers, and one pound of calf's liver into slices the third of an inch thick. Fry both sides of the bacon brown; place it round a dish before the fire. Dredge flour on both sides of the liver; fry it slowly till brown, and place it on the dish. Pour away the fat, dredge a dessert-spoonful of dry flour into the frying-pan; pour in a gill of boiling water, add a dash of pepper and half a salt-spoonful of salt, shake the pan till the gravy thickens and browns, pour it over the liver and bacon, and serve at once.
A straightforward Victorian fry-up whose only real difficulty is restraint: the liver is done long before most cooks think it is. Everything else is measurement.
- A gillCassell's is a British book, so a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or two-thirds of a cup. American sources of the same era often mean half a cup; either quantity makes a thin pan gravy here.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons of flour. A salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so "half a salt-spoonful" is a pinch — taste the gravy and adjust rather than trusting the figure.
- The hinge: cook the liver brieflySlices a third of an inch thick need only about 90 seconds to two minutes a side over moderate heat. 'Fry it slowly till brown' is easily overdone on a modern gas or induction burner; liver held past faint pinkness in the centre turns grainy and dry, and no gravy repairs it.
- Calf's liverOrder it from a butcher, or substitute lamb's liver, the nearest widely available stand-in, though stronger in flavour. Ox or pig liver is stronger and coarser still and will not behave the same way. Some cooks soak liver in milk for 30 minutes and pat it dry; this is traditional practice, not in the original.
- BaconUse dry-cured streaky rashers. Modern wet-cured supermarket bacon leaks water, steams rather than fries, and gives you neither the brown edges nor the clean fat the gravy depends on.
- "Pour away the fat"Leave about two teaspoons of fat in the pan, or the flour will scorch instead of forming a roux. Deglaze with boiling water off the heat, then return the pan to a low flame and shake or whisk until it thickens — a minute at most.
- Keeping it hot"Before the fire" means a warm spot, not a hot one. A plate in a 200F oven does the same job without continuing to cook the meat.
- YieldA pound of liver with half a pound of bacon serves three, or four with potatoes and greens.
Liver and bacon was a fixture of English chophouses and cookshops through the nineteenth century, one of the cheap hot dinners a working man could buy ready-cooked, and it survived into pub cooking well past the Victorian period. The pairing is practical as much as culinary: liver is very lean and dries out at once, while the bacon supplies both the frying fat and the salt the liver lacks. Calf's liver was the expensive grade, milder and more tender than ox.