Liver Loaf
Parboil four slices of calf's liver, remove skin, chop, and press through a sieve. To each cup of liver add one fourth cup soft bread crumbs, one tablespoon butter, one teaspoon salt, one half teaspoon paprika, few grains cayenne, and two eggs. Mix well, pour into a buttered mold, place in a pan of hot water, and bake one hour. Serve hot with Vinaigrette Sauce, or it may be served cold as a salad.
Mock Pâté de Foie Gras Use the cooked liver loaf mixture. Mash, add butter to make of consistency to spread, arrange on rounds of buttered toast, and garnish with yolks of hard-cooked eggs pressed through a ricer, and slices of pimolas.
A liver custard baked in a water bath, essentially a savoury pâté set with egg. The technique is sound; the vagueness is all in quantities and oven heat.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A water-bath custard of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F. Higher and the eggs curdle and weep before the centre sets.
- "Four slices of calf's liver"Unhelpfully vague, since slice thickness is not specified. Work by volume instead: about 1 lb of trimmed liver yields roughly 2 cups sieved, which with the proportions given makes a loaf for four to six as an entree.
- Parboil, then sieveSimmer the liver 5-8 minutes only, until firm enough to handle but still pink inside; it finishes in the oven. Overcooked liver turns dry and grainy. A food processor does the job in seconds, though a final pass through a sieve still gives the smoother texture the recipe is after.
- Butter and crumbsOne tablespoon of butter per cup of liver is lean by modern pâté standards. Soft bread crumbs means fresh, not dried — dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will make the loaf stodgy.
- TimingAn hour is right for a loaf pan or a quart mold, but test at 45 minutes. The loaf is done when the centre reaches 160F and a knife comes out clean; liver custard goes chalky quickly past that point.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento. Any pimiento-stuffed olive works.
- Vinaigrette SauceA cross-reference to a separate recipe in the book. In this tradition it typically means a sharp oil-and-vinegar dressing with chopped additions such as capers, parsley and hard-cooked egg rather than a plain salad vinaigrette; the acid is doing real work against the richness of the liver.
- UnmoldingLine the buttered mold with parchment before filling. Cool the loaf 10 minutes in the water bath, then turn out; served cold, chill it in the mold overnight and it will slice much more neatly.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other cookbooks issued by food firms it surrounded its confectionery pages with a full general cookery course in the Boston Cooking School style -- precise level measurements, water baths, sauces named and cross-referenced. The second half of this entry is the more telling one: genuine pâté de foie gras, made from the fattened liver of force-fed geese, was an expensive import, and "mock" versions built from calf's or chicken liver mashed with butter had become a familiar feature of American cookbooks by the late nineteenth century. Calf's liver was cheap by comparison and respectable at table, so the same mixture could be sent out hot as an entree, cold as a salad, or spread on toast rounds with riced egg yolk and olive for a lunch or card-party plate -- three dishes from one baking, which is exactly the kind of economy these books were selling.