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Deviled Liver
Put the liver into a deep dish, cover it with milk, and let it stand about an hour; take it out and skin it. Prepare about a tablespoon each of lard and butter, mixed with salt and pepper and an onion chopped fine. Put this in slits cut into the liver. Then put it in a pan and pour on enough water to cover it. Put it in the oven, with a cover on, and bake half an hour, then take cover off and bake another half-hour.
— Miss Matilda Jackson
VEAL CUTLET (Breaded).
Cut meat in pieces to suit, salt same, dip in flour and beat. Beat an egg in a pan, dip the meat in the egg, then in cracker dust or bread crumbs, and fry.
— Mrs. J. H. Bagley
VEAL POTΡΙΕ.
Take two pounds of veal, put in a kettle which has a tight cover, cover with boiling water, let boil slowly half an hour, then add salt and pepper to taste. Continue to boil until the veal is tender, then cover with dumplings made of one cup of flour, one-half cup of milk, scant teaspoon of salt, one heaping teaspoon of baking powder, one rounded teaspoon of lard. Put a weight on the lid of the kettle to prevent the steam from escaping. Let boil steadily for twenty minutes. Do not take the lid off the kettle while the dumplings are boiling.
— Mrs. Stanley Vincent
A whole liver, larded through slits with seasoned fat and braised covered then uncovered — a village version of larding rather than the peppery "devil" the name usually implies. Two further receipts from neighbours got printed on the same page and are noted at the end.
- What liver, and how muchThe receipt says neither. A whole calf's liver is the likeliest candidate for a dish treated this way; a single supermarket slab of calf or beef liver of about 1.5 lb will behave similarly, and lamb's liver is smaller and sweeter and will cook faster.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a modern oven, around 350F suits a covered braise like this; the uncovered second half can go to 375F to colour the surface.
- The milk soakAn hour in milk draws out blood and mutes the metallic edge, and it is still worth doing. Discard the milk and pat the liver dry before cutting slits, or the seasoned fat will slide straight out.
- SkinningThe tough outer membrane peels away much more easily if you start a corner with the tip of a knife and pull with a dry cloth or paper towel. On a whole liver, also trim out the larger tubes near the thick end.
- The hinge: an hour is a long timeLiver goes grainy and livery once past medium. A whole 2 to 3 lb piece braised covered will survive the full hour and slice like a pot roast; a thinner 1.5 lb piece will be dry well before then. Test at 40 minutes and pull it when a skewer meets only slight resistance.
- "Deviled" without the devilDeviled normally means mustard, cayenne or Worcestershire. This version relies on onion, salt and pepper alone, so if you want the name to earn itself, work dry mustard and cayenne into the lard-and-butter paste before it goes into the slits.
- Water levelCovering the liver entirely with water poaches rather than braises it and dilutes the drippings. Half an inch in the pan is enough under a lid; the pan juices then reduce usefully once the cover comes off, and can be thickened for gravy.
- The two extra receiptsThe breaded veal cutlet is a standard flour-egg-crumb coating; "beat" after flouring most likely means to pound the cutlet thin rather than to whisk anything. In the potpie, do not weight the lid of a modern pan — a tight-fitting lid holds plenty of steam, and a loaded lid on a pot of boiling liquid is a bad habit. Twenty minutes undisturbed is what the receipt calls for.
"Deviled" entered English cookery in the eighteenth century for anything treated with hot seasoning — mustard, cayenne, pepper — and by the late nineteenth it attached loosely to almost any dish given a sharp savoury dressing, which is how a mild onion-and-butter stuffing could carry the name in a village kitchen. The technique underneath it is older and plainer: cutting slits in a lean piece of meat and pressing fat into them is larding, the standard remedy for anything that would otherwise cook dry, and liver has almost no internal fat of its own. Soaking liver in milk is a domestic practice often said to draw off blood and soften the flavour. Community cookbooks like this one seem to have carried receipts much as neighbours submitted them, which is why three unrelated meat dishes from three different women sit on one page with no editorial hand between them.