Stewed Liver
1 1/2 pint diced liver 1 pint Brown Sauce 1 gill of cooking wine 1/4 teaspoon seasoning 1/8 teaspoon pepper Parboil liver for twenty minutes, then cut into inch dice, enough for a pint and a half. Combine wine, Brown Sauce and seasonings, add liver and simmer until liver is soft, and serve on thin squares of buttered toast. Garnish with parsley.
A late-Victorian-into-Edwardian way of stretching organ meat with a made sauce and toast. The instructions are terse and the timings belong to an era that liked liver cooked through and then some.
- The hinge: total cooking timeTwenty minutes of parboiling followed by a simmer "until liver is soft" will give you grainy, chalky cubes. Liver firms and dries the moment it passes medium; a brief blanch and five to eight minutes in the hot sauce is closer to the mark, and calf's liver needs even less.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. "Cooking wine" in a book of this date most likely meant an ordinary cheap sherry, Madeira or red table wine rather than today's salted supermarket cooking wine, which is not the same product; use a wine you would drink.
- Brown SauceNot bottled brown sauce. This is the book's own espagnole-style sauce built from browned flour, fat and stock, of which a pint is two cups. A good beef demi-glace loosened with stock stands in.
- "1/4 teaspoon seasoning"In this shorthand it most likely means salt, since pepper is listed separately. A quarter teaspoon for a finished dish of roughly five and a half cups is modest; taste at the end, since the sauce carries its own salt.
- How much liverA pint and a half is a volume, not a weight; expect to need roughly 1 1/2 lb of raw liver to yield that in inch dice. Beef liver would be the cheap everyday choice; calf's is milder and more forgiving.
- TrimmingPeel the membrane and cut out the tough vessels before dicing, or the cubes curl and go stringy in the sauce. Parboiling makes the membrane easier to lift away.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities will stretch to four to six servings over toast. Cut the bread thin and set the toast down at the last moment so it does not go to pulp under the sauce.
Liver was cheap and a standard part of the American household repertoire when this book was compiled. What lifts this version above plain fried liver and onions is the brown sauce: a roux-based stock sauce out of the French kitchen that American cookery books had absorbed by the turn of the century and printed as a foundation recipe to be cross-referenced, exactly as it is here. Serving a saucy meat dish on buttered toast squares with parsley was a common way to dress up an inexpensive cut for the dinner table, and the same formula turns up under names like creamed sweetbreads, chicken à la king and devilled kidneys. Gold Medal's book, published by the Washburn Crosby milling company, existed to sell flour, which is part of why a thickened sauce sits at the centre of a dish about liver.