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Dried Liver for Relish
Salt the liver well for four days; hang to smoke and dry. Cut in very thin slices, and broil in pepper and butter.--Mrs. W.
This is a home-curing and cold-smoking procedure written for a household that had a smokehouse, a cool season and a tolerance for loss. The finished slices are cooked, but everything that happens before the broiler is the problem.
- No measured cure"Salt the liver well" gives no weight of salt, no weight of meat and no ratio. A dry cure only works when the salt concentration reaches a level that suppresses bacterial growth throughout the piece, and that cannot be judged by eye or by hand.
- Liver does not cure like hamWhole-muscle cures rely on salt migrating slowly and evenly through dense, close-grained tissue. Liver is soft, porous and rich in blood, and it spoils faster than almost any other cut. It was never a good candidate for the four-day salt-and-hang treatment that worked on a side of bacon.
- Smoking here is not cookingSmokehouse smoking of this kind was generally done cool, for preservation and flavour rather than heat; the recipe itself names no fuel and no temperature. The meat can sit for hours or days in the range where Clostridium botulinum and other organisms multiply, with no nitrite in the cure to check them.
- No temperature anywhere in the recipeThere is no ambient temperature for the salting, no smokehouse temperature, and no target for the drying. Modern curing guidance specifies all three because the margin between a safe cure and a spoiled one is narrow.
- Broiling does not undo itCooking the finished slices kills vegetative bacteria, but brief broiling cannot be relied on to inactivate any botulinum toxin already formed, and it does not make a badly cured product safe. The final heat step is the least important part of this procedure.
- If you want the dishFollow a current, tested curing recipe with weighed salt, a specified curing salt, and stated temperatures and times. Do not scale or adapt the instructions above.
Dried and smoked meats were the backbone of the Virginia larder, and a household that was already running a smokehouse for hams and middlings had every reason to put the offal through it too. Liver spoils within a day or two of slaughter, so at hog-killing time it had to be eaten immediately, potted, or preserved by whatever means the smokehouse allowed; this recipe is the third option. The word "relish" here carries its older sense of a savoury titbit eaten in small quantity to sharpen the appetite rather than a condiment in a jar, and the very thin slices broiled in pepper and butter suggest a breakfast or supper dish served a few pieces at a time. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from named Virginia housewives, and the terse "Mrs. W." attribution is typical of the book: these were working notes passed between women who already knew what a smokehouse smelled like and how long a hog took to cool, and who needed no more instruction than this.