For Filling
1 cup minced cooked liver 1 teaspoon minced onion 1/2 cup Spanish Sauce 1 teaspoon vinegar 1 tablespoon chopped mushrooms 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne
This is a component rather than a finished dish: an ingredient list for a savory filling meant to go into an omelet, into halved hard-boiled eggs, or between crepes. The book gives no method, so the assembly is left to the cook.
- What to do with itWarm the Spanish sauce, stir in the minced liver, onion, mushrooms, vinegar and seasoning, and heat just until hot through — two or three minutes. The liver is already cooked; simmering it again turns it grainy and dry.
- Spanish SauceIn books of this period the name generally covers a tomato-based sauce cooked with onion and green pepper, sometimes with a little stock, rather than a Spanish-style sofrito or a Mexican salsa. Half a cup of any thick, well-reduced tomato sauce with sauteed onion and pepper stands in cleanly.
- The liverThe recipe specifies only cooked liver, so leftovers from a previous meal are the likely source. Chicken livers, sauteed until just firm and then minced, give the mildest result; beef liver will dominate everything else in the bowl.
- Few grains cayenneA pinch; treat it as 1/8 teaspoon or less.
- The mushroomsAssume cooked, whether canned or sauteed fresh. Raw mushrooms stirred in at the end will shed water and thin the filling.
- The vinegarOne teaspoon is not a mistake and should not be left out. It cuts the richness of the liver, which otherwise flattens against the tomato.
- YieldSomething over a cup of filling once the ingredients are combined — enough for a three- or four-egg omelet, or to stuff a good number of hard-boiled egg halves.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and like other flour-company books of its era it ranged well beyond baking into the whole business of running a kitchen economically. A filling built on a cup of already-cooked liver is thrift writing, putting to use what a kitchen already had on hand. Recipes of this shape — ingredients listed, method assumed — can be found in early twentieth-century American books, which took for granted that a cook who could read a list knew what to do with it. Organ meats sat squarely in ordinary middle-class cooking then; their retreat to specialty status in the United States is largely a post-war development.