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Liver, Curried
Cut the liver into suitable sized pieces, and cook in a good curry sauce (see CURRY SAUCE). Serve with boiled rice and fried onions. A mixture of liver and kidney makes a nice curry, but the kidney must be cooked longer than the liver.
A cross-reference entry rather than a full recipe: Cassell's assumes you already have curry sauce on hand and only needs to tell you what to do with the liver. The whole dish hinges on not overcooking the liver.
- Timing is everythingLiver toughens and goes grainy within a couple of minutes of being cooked through. Cut it into 1-inch pieces, add it to already-hot sauce and give it 3-5 minutes at a bare simmer, no more. It should still be faintly pink at the centre when you take it off the heat.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four people, allow about 1 lb (450 g) of liver to roughly a pint (500 ml) of curry sauce, with 8 oz (225 g) of raw long-grain rice alongside.
- Which liverOx and sheep's liver were cheap and widely available in Victorian kitchens, both strongly flavoured and suited to a heavily spiced sauce. Lamb's or calf's liver is milder and more tender; chicken livers cook in barely two minutes. Soaking strong liver in milk for an hour before cooking mellows it.
- Trim it properlyPull off the outer membrane and cut out the pale tubes and connective tissue before dicing, or the pieces will curl and turn chewy in the sauce.
- The kidney versionThe instruction is sound: kidney wants longer than liver, and ox kidney in particular needs a good 20-30 minutes of gentle simmering to become tender, so cook it in the sauce first and add the liver only at the end. Halve the kidneys, snip out the white core, and expect a strong smell in the first few minutes of cooking.
- Curry sauce in this bookA Victorian curry sauce of this type generally means a flour-thickened stock sauce flavoured with commercial curry powder, sometimes with apple, onion and a little chutney or lemon; the book's own CURRY SAUCE entry gives the particulars. It is not an Indian gravy, and it will taste of the particular curry powder you use, so buy a good one or make your own blend.
- Fried onionsThe garnish is what modern Indian cooking calls birista: onions sliced thin and fried slowly in plenty of fat until deep brown and crisp. Drain them on paper and scatter over at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- ServingNo yield is given; the quantities suggested above would serve about four. Boiled rice here means plain, well-drained and dry-grained, in the Anglo-Indian manner.
Curried liver belongs to the long Anglo-Indian tail of British cookery, in which the curry powder tin became a standard way of using up cheap or strongly flavoured meat. Curry entered English cookbooks in the eighteenth century and by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared, late in the nineteenth, it had been thoroughly domesticated: a made sauce, thickened with roux, seasoned from a commercial blend, and applied to whatever the household had. Offal was an obvious candidate. Liver and kidney were among the cheapest things at the butcher's, they went off quickly, and the spice covered any strength of flavour; it is perhaps no coincidence that so many Victorian curry recipes are for rabbit, veal scraps, cold mutton and the innards. The entry's brevity is characteristic of the book's dictionary format, where a technique such as curry sauce is written out once and then referred to across dozens of headings.