Home › Meat Recipes › Calf's Liver à La Madrid
Calf's Liver à La Madrid
1½ lbs. calf's liver I 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 ozs.) butter 2 chopped onions 1/2 pint (I cup) stock 3 egg yolks 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Salt and pepper I heaping tablespoonful (I Some toast points oz.) flour Melt the butter in a casserole; cut the liver in thin slices and fry it in the butter for three minutes; take out the liver, add the onions to the butter, fry till a nice brown color; then sprinkle in the flour, add the stock, and bring to the boil; then add the liver, cover and simmer for thirty minutes, stir in the yolks of eggs and the lemon juice, season nicely with salt and pepper.
Place the toast points on the top and serve in the casserole.
The ingredient list has come through the scanner badly garbled, and the method contains one step that will fail if taken literally. Read both before starting.
- Reading the quantitiesThe liver is 1½ lbs, as the printed page gives; that matches the cup of stock and two onions. The stray capital I's elsewhere in the ingredient list are the numeral 1: 1 cup stock, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.) flour.
- What "casserole" means hereThe liver is fried and then simmered in the same vessel, so this is a lidded flameproof pot used on the stove, not a baking dish. Use a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven that can both fry and simmer.
- The egg yolks are the hingeStirred straight into a boiling sauce they will scramble. Pull the pot off the heat, beat the yolks with a ladleful of the hot liquid, return them to the pot and hold it below a simmer, around 175F, until the sauce thickens. It must not boil again.
- Thirty minutes is too longCalf's liver sliced thin is done in three or four minutes and turns grainy and grey past that. Simmer the onion, flour and stock gravy for twenty-five to thirty minutes on its own to cook out the flour, then slip the liver back in for the last three or four minutes before the yolks go in.
- Preparing the liverPeel off the outer membrane and cut out any large tubes, then slice about 1/4 inch thick. Pat the slices dry or they will steam rather than brown in the butter.
- Butter and flourThree ounces of butter to one ounce of flour is a very loose roux; the yolks are doing most of the thickening. If you want a firmer sauce, take the butter down to about 2 oz.
- Toast pointsTriangles of crustless bread, fried in butter or dry-toasted, laid on the surface at the moment of serving so they do not go soft.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green vegetable, or six as part of a larger meal.
Calf's liver was a respectable dish rather than an economy, milder and finer-grained than ox liver and priced accordingly. Dressing it "à la Madrid" belongs to the era's habit of hanging place-names on sauces; here the Spanish label seems to rest on the browned onion and the sharpening of lemon juice, since nothing else in the method is particularly Iberian. Cookery in a single vessel that could go from stove to table was sold as both modern and labour-saving, and instructions to "serve in the casserole" were the whole point of the exercise. Finishing a brown gravy with egg yolks and acid is older still, a thickening habit inherited from French practice that gradually gave way to plain roux and cream sauces over the twentieth century.