Home › CHAPTER XLIV › CHAPTER XLIV: Liver
CHAPTER XLIV: Liver
Stewed Calf's Liver. 1 calf's liver, 1 turnip, 1 carrot, 1 stalk celery, 1 onion, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful browned flour.
Wash and cut the liver in slices.
In a saucepan put the turnip, carrot, celery, and onion (all sliced); lay the liver on top of the vegetables; sprinkle salt and pepper over it, and pour on a pint boiling water; cover, and let stew until the liver is tender.
When done, take out the liver and put on a hot platter; thicken the gravy with butter and flour; strain, and pour over the meat.
Broiled Liver.
Cut calf's liver into half inch slices, cover with boiling water, let stand five or six minutes, drain, and wipe dry. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and broil in a greased broiler five minutes. Put on a hot platter and spread with bits of butter. Serve very hot.
Braised Calf's Liver, 1 calf's liver, onion, ounces bacon, 3 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 sliced carrot, bay leaf, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 cupful stock, cupful strained tomatoes In the liver make many small slits with a paring knife and insert slices of onion and bits of sliced bacon.
Heat in a spider 3 tablespoonfuls bacon drippings and add flour to the fat. Brown the flour in the fat, then add the liver, and roll it on all sides until it is seared in the fat and covered with fat and flour. Place the liver in the heated casserole, add cartoes. Bake two hours and a half. Calf's Liver and Bacon.
Sauté calf's liver in bacon fat, and when done, make a gravy from it with flour and hot water. Heat a pan, and drop in slices of bacon. If the pan is very hot, they will curl into rolls and brown in a few minutes. Arrange the liver, and garnish with parsley.
Veal Kidney Omelet. 1 veal kidney, 1 tablespoonful butter, teaspoonful salt, Dash pepper, 4 eggs, 1 tablespoonful warm water.
Remove the fat and tubes from a kidney and chop fine. Place in a frying pan with butter, salt, and pepper, and shake over a hot fire until the meat is golden brown. Beat the eggs without separating; add the warm water. Heat the butter in a spider, pour in the eggs, and shake over the fire till the mixture begins to set.
Draw back-so the omelet may set without burning; turn the cooked kidney over the center, fold up, and serve on a hot platter.
Veal Kidneys Deviled.
Split in half 3 veal kidneys and take out the fibrous parts. Spread both sides with a mayonnaise, season highly, roll in bread crumbs, dip in melted butter, and broil over a hot fire. Serve at once.
Fried Sweetbreads. 1 pair sweetbreads, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful milk, Salt and pepper.
A run of variety-meat recipes from an era when a whole calf's liver was a routine market purchase. The measurements have suffered in transcription — several quantities are simply missing — and one instruction in particular will ruin the dish if followed.
- Do not braise liver for two and a half hoursThat timing belongs to a tough cut, not to liver, which passes from tender to grainy and dry soon after it reaches doneness. The recipe names no oven temperature; a whole larded calf's liver in a moderate oven is likely to be done in about an hour, well short of the time given.
- A whole calf's liverExpect 3 to 4 lb, feeding eight to ten. Modern butchers rarely sell one entire; buy it by weight, sliced or in a single lobe, and ask for veal liver rather than beef, which is stronger and coarser.
- "Spider" and "casserole"A spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed for hearth cooking; any heavy skillet serves. The heated casserole here is a lidded flameproof pot for the oven, not a shallow baking dish — a Dutch oven is the direct equivalent.
- Missing quantities in the braiseThe original reads "onion", "ounces bacon" and "cupful strained tomatoes" with the numbers dropped, and "add cartoes" appears to be garbled for the carrot and tomatoes. Reckon on perhaps 3 oz bacon and a cup of strained tomatoes with the cup of stock; the liquid should come partway up the liver, not cover it.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured, commonly kept on hand for dark gravies. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so a tablespoon of browned flour gives a thinner sauce than you may expect.
- The scald before broilingStanding the slices in boiling water five minutes firms the surface and draws out blood, which reduces the metallic edge some people taste. It also part-cooks them, so five minutes under a hot broiler is enough — turn once and pull the liver while the centre is still faintly pink.
- Deviled kidneysVeal kidneys need the fibrous white core cut out cleanly or they stay chewy and smell strongly. The mayonnaise here is a coating that sets and browns under the broiler; a stiff, well-seasoned mayonnaise holds the crumbs better than a loose one.
- The sweetbread recipe is incompleteOnly the ingredient list survives on this page — there is no method. Sweetbreads in any case require several hours of soaking in cold water, a brief blanch, then pressing under a weight before they can be crumbed and fried; use a full recipe.
- YieldsThe stew and the braise each serve eight to ten as written. The kidney omelet, on four eggs, is a dish for two.
Offal held a far larger place in the American household kitchen of that era than it does now, and books of this kind gave it a chapter of its own because it was cheap, perishable and sold in whole units that a cook had to know what to do with. Calf's liver was the aristocrat of the group — milder and more tender than beef liver, and priced accordingly — while sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas of a young animal) were genuinely a luxury, appearing on hotel menus of the period alongside terrapin and canvasback. The larding of a whole liver with slivers of onion and bacon, as in the braise here, is a straightforwardly French technique carried into the American domestic-science kitchen, where the emphasis on browned flour, strained gravies and a hot platter reflects the era's conviction that plain food deserved careful method. The long cooking times throughout the chapter are typical of the moment: reliable oven thermometers were not yet standard in home kitchens, and it is often said that cookbook writers erred toward overcooking rather than risk the alternative.