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Salt, Pepper and Nutmeg (Cut up the bacon and fry it)
Cut up the bacon and fry it. Slice the liver and add to the bacon; fry it a little, then put in the carrot and onion sliced, also the herbs, and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
When cooked sufficiently, pound all in a mortar.
Rub through a sieve. The farce is then ready for use.
This is a farce à gratin — a pounded liver forcemeat used to stuff, line or enrich other dishes. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Working proportionsThe original gives no quantities. A workable ratio is roughly 1 lb chicken or calf's liver to 6 oz fatty bacon with one small carrot, one onion and a little thyme and bay; that will give you something over a pound of farce, enough to stuff a large fish or line a raised pie.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liver"Fry it a little" points to brief cooking at this stage; liver taken well past done turns grainy and metallic, and pounding and sieving will not bring the texture back. Note that the recipe's later "when cooked sufficiently" applies to the whole panful, liver included.
- Which liverCalf's or chicken liver suits a farce of this kind; ox liver is generally reckoned too strong for it. Chicken livers are the easiest modern substitute and give the smoothest result.
- BaconThe bacon is fat and seasoning, not flavour-of-smoke. Use unsmoked streaky bacon or fresh pork belly; heavily smoked supermarket rashers will dominate the finished farce.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve or drum sieve afterwards — that step removes the connective tissue and vein fragments that make a liver farce gritty, and the machine will not do it for you.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and keep it light: about a quarter teaspoon for a pound of liver. Nutmeg with liver and pork is a standard charcuterie pairing, but pre-ground nutmeg is stale and flat and easily overdone.
- Seasoning blindSeason the pan mixture before pounding, then taste the sieved farce and adjust; forcemeat used cold needs more salt than you expect.
- KeepingBecause it contains cooked liver, this is a two- to three-day refrigerator item at most. Press a film of clarified butter over the surface if holding it, and bring the whole dish it is used in to a proper cooking temperature.
Farce comes from the Latin farcire, to stuff, and by the late nineteenth century the English professional kitchen had adopted the French vocabulary wholesale — farce, quenelle, panada, gratin. A farce à gratin specifically meant this kind of pounded liver-and-bacon paste, distinguished from the paler veal or fish forcemeats by its colour and richness. It was a workhorse rather than a dish: spread on croûtes under roast game birds, used to line game and raised pies, piped into boned poultry, or bound with breadcrumbs to stuff a large baked fish. Recipes of this type are typically written as bare methods because the ingredients were familiar to a cook who made the paste weekly. The pounding and sieving that the original disposes of in six words represented the real labour, and it is precisely the sort of task that made a well-staffed kitchen the assumed reader.