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Bacon and Chicken Livers
Cut six chicken livers in slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add an equal amount of sliced bacon. Cook together until livers are tender. Add two tablespoons flour, one half teaspoon salt, one cup stock or tomato. Season with Worcestershire and serve hot on toast.
A quick skillet dish from a book better known for chocolate; the method is sound but the timings and quantities are left entirely to the cook.
- Livers are the hingeChicken livers go from pink to grainy in under a minute of overcooking. Slice them thick, cook until just firm and cooked through, and pull them from the pan while the sauce finishes if need be. The USDA figure for poultry, including giblets, is 165F.
- Render the bacon first"Cook together" works better as two stages: render the bacon until its fat runs and it begins to crisp, then add the livers to that fat. Starting them at the same time gives you flabby bacon and overdone livers.
- The flour needs a momentTwo tablespoons of flour stirred into the pan fat is a roux. Let it cook a minute before the liquid goes in or the sauce will taste of raw flour.
- "One cup stock or tomato"Tomato here means canned tomato or tomato pulp rather than tomato paste, which was not yet widely stocked in American kitchens when the book appeared. A cup of chopped canned tomatoes with their juice matches the intent.
- SaltThe recipe salts three times: on the livers, in the sauce, and again by way of the bacon and Worcestershire. Skip the half teaspoon in the sauce until you have tasted it.
- WorcestershireNo quantity is given. A teaspoon for this volume is enough to register; two makes it the dominant flavor.
- YieldSix livers and a like amount of bacon will cover roughly four slices of toast, so figure about two servings as a supper dish or four as a savory course.
- Filed oddlyNothing in the method keeps; eat it the day it is made.
Chicken livers on toast belong to the family of English "savouries" — small, salty, highly seasoned dishes served at the end of a formal dinner or, in American households, at breakfast, luncheon, or as a chafing-dish supper. The combination of liver, bacon and Worcestershire sauce is generally traced to that British tradition; Worcestershire itself, commercially bottled from the 1830s, was the standard American shortcut to a savory, fermented depth that would otherwise take stock and time. That this appears in a cook book issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, reflects the common practice of the period: confectioners and flour millers published full general cook books, chocolate recipes threaded among them, as advertising that earned a permanent place on the kitchen shelf. Livers were also simple economy — a bird bought whole came with them, and a recipe that turned the giblets into a hot supper dish was worth printing.