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Chicken Livers with Mushrooms
Make a brown sauce; add two cups sliced cooked livers and one cup chopped mushrooms. Reheat and serve on toast. Two tablespoons wine may be added.
A one-line reheat-and-serve dish that assumes you already have brown sauce and cooked livers on hand. The whole thing hinges on how briefly it sits over the heat.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this date this means a simple brown roux sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour until nut-brown, then whisked with roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups brown stock and seasoned. Not the bottled British condiment sold under that name today.
- Cooked liversTwo cups sliced cooked livers means something over a pound of raw chicken livers, trimmed of green spots and connective tissue, since they shrink in the pan. Saut hen slool, then slice; livers cooked hard turn chalky and grainy.
- Reheat means reheatFold livers and mushrooms into the hot sauce and bring it back to serving temperature only, two or three minutes. Simmering the mixture undoes the livers entirely.
- MushroomsThe original may well have meant canned or bottled mushrooms, already cooked; the recipe does not say. With fresh, use about 4 oz chopped and cook them in butter until they have released their liquid and it has evaporated, or the sauce will thin and taste raw.
- The wineSherry or Madeira suits this kind of dish better than red wine, and two tablespoons stirred in at the end, off the heat, keeps its flavour from cooking away.
- ToastFirm white bread, toasted and cut into triangles or trimmed rectangles, one or two pieces per serving. Butter it if you like, but the sauce is rich enough without.
- YieldServes four as a lunch or supper dish, or six to eight as a small first course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to sell chocolate, and alongside its confectionery chapters it carries a full general household repertoire. This dish belongs to a whole family of turn-of-the-century American "on toast" savories -- creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms under glass -- that let a cook turn small quantities of an odd cut into a course fit for company. Chicken livers were cheap and plentiful in a period when whole birds were bought and dressed at home, and the pairing with brown sauce and a spoonful of sherry echoes French hotel practice as it was filtered through American cooking-school teaching.