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Calf's Liver Fried
A calf's liver, as white as can be procured, flour, one bunch savory herbs, including parsley, juice of a lemon; pepper and salt to taste, a little water. Cut the liver into slices of a good and equal shape. Dip them in flour and fry brown. Place on a hot dish and keep before the fire while you prepare the gravy. Mince the herbs fine and put into the frying-pan with a little more butter; add the other ingredients with one teaspoonful flour. Simmer gently until the herbs are done, and pour over the liver.--Mrs. A. M. D.
A straightforward pan-fried liver with a herb pan sauce; the original leaves nearly every quantity to the cook's judgment. Two things decide whether it succeeds: thin even slices and a very short time in the pan.
- Don't cook it throughCalf's liver turns grainy and metallic once it is fully firm. Slices about 3/8 inch thick want roughly 1 to 2 minutes a side in hot butter, until beaded with juice but still faintly pink at the centre.
- "As white as can be procured"Pale liver was generally taken to indicate a young milk-fed calf, milder and more tender than beef liver. A butcher's calf's liver is the closest equivalent; beef liver will work but is markedly stronger and coarser, and no cooking method disguises that.
- Even slices"A good and equal shape" is the practical instruction. Pull off the thin outer membrane and cut on a slight angle so the pieces are of one thickness, or the thin ends will be dry before the thick ones are set.
- Keeping it hot"Keep before the fire" means somewhere warm but not cooking. A dish in a 170-200F oven, loosely covered, holds it for the few minutes the gravy takes.
- The gravyThis is a pan sauce built in the frying pan: about 2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon flour, the minced herbs, a few tablespoons of water, and the lemon juice. "Simmer gently until the herbs are done" is 2 to 3 minutes -- long enough to lose the raw flour taste, not long enough to reduce to paste.
- Savory herbsA bunch of savory herbs in this period usually amounted to parsley with thyme and marjoram, sometimes with a little sage or summer savory. A generous 1/4 cup minced, mostly parsley, suits the quantity here.
- Quantities and yieldNo weight is given. A liver of about 1 1/2 lb, sliced, serves four to six; season the flour as well as the sauce, since flouring dilutes surface salt.
- Flour and fatFlour the slices just before they go in the pan. Floured liver left to sit turns sticky and the coating slides off instead of browning.
Fried liver with a lemon-and-herb pan gravy belongs to a long Anglo-American tradition of cooking offal on the day it was bought, since liver spoils faster than muscle meat and, before reliable refrigeration, went into the pan almost immediately. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is full of such attributed receipts -- this one signed only "Mrs. A. M. D." -- and they read as notes between cooks rather than instructions for beginners, which is why quantities and pan sizes go unstated. The insistence on liver "as white as can be procured" points to a market preference of the period: pale liver was taken to indicate a young milk-fed calf and was generally valued above the darker liver of grass-fed or older animals. Serving the meat on a hot dish before the fire while the gravy is built in the same pan is standard nineteenth-century practice, and it survives essentially unchanged in the modern habit of resting a steak while deglazing.