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Chicken Livers in Fontage Cups
1 cup chicken livers ½ cup chicken stock 1 cup salt pork cubes 2 tablespoons flour ½ cup mushrooms Chop livers and sauté in pork fat; add flour, stock and mushrooms. Cook five minutes, season to taste, and serve in fontage cups.
A late-Victorian entrée in miniature: a thick liver ragout spooned into fried batter shells. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the cups are made, and the cups are the part that needs planning.
- Fontage cupsThese are the fried batter shells made on a fontage (timbale) iron — a metal form on a long handle, heated in fat, dipped into a thin egg-and-milk batter, and returned to the fat until the shell slips off. Irons are still sold for rosettes and timbales. Puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases or small toast cups are the usual modern substitute.
- Salt porkA cup of cubes is there for the fat, not primarily for the meat. Render them slowly until crisp, lift them out, and sauté the livers in the fat that remains — two to three tablespoons is plenty. Return the cracklings at the end or leave them out; the dish is very salty if all of them go back in.
- Season at the endBetween the salt pork and a reduced stock, the mixture will be well salted before you add anything. Taste after the five minutes of cooking, then adjust.
- Chop, then sauté brieflyChopped livers cook through in two or three minutes over fairly high heat. They should be firm and no longer red inside, but they turn grainy and dry quickly past that point, so get colour on them fast and move on.
- The flour and stockTwo tablespoons of flour to half a cup of stock gives a paste, not a sauce. Sprinkle the flour over the livers, cook it a minute in the fat, then add the stock off the heat and stir; expect to add another quarter cup or so of stock to reach a spoonable consistency for filling the cups.
- MushroomsHalf a cup, presumably sliced; the recipe does not say. Canned button mushrooms were widely available when this was written and may well be what was meant; fresh ones should go in with the livers so their water cooks off rather than thinning the sauce.
- YieldAbout two cups of filling — six to eight small cups, serving four as a first course.
Fontage cups belong to the fussy small-service style that American cooking-school teachers borrowed from French practice around 1900: a batter shell fried on a decorative iron, crisp and neutral, built to hold creamed oysters, sweetbreads, peas or, as here, a liver ragout. Cooking-school books of the period printed similar instructions under names such as timbale cases and fontage cups, and the irons were sold as kitchen equipment at the time. The dish also shows the era's thrift: chicken livers and salt pork were cheap, and dressing them in a fried shell turned offal into a course you could put in front of guests. Lowney's Cook Book, compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is remembered mainly for its chocolate work, but it also carried a general cookery section alongside the advertising.