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Liver Bearnaise
Cut medium slices beef liver, parboil it, trim evenly. Season with salt and pepper. Baste the slices with melted butter or bacon fat, roll in bread crumbs, broil until done. Serve with alternate slices of French toast with Bearnaise sauce.
A broiled liver cutlet dressed up with a classic butter sauce, written for a sickroom tray. The whole dish turns on not overcooking the liver, which the parboiling step already pushes it toward.
- The hinge: donenessBeef liver goes grainy and dry once it passes roughly 160F internal. Since the slices are already parboiled here, they need only a few minutes under the broiler to colour the crumbs; the parboiling will have taken the centre most of the way, so the margin for keeping them juicy is small.
- Why parboil at allA brief blanch firms the slices so they trim cleanly and may tame some of the mineral bite. A soak in milk for 20-30 minutes accomplishes much the same softening of flavour without a second cooking.
- Broiler distanceButtered crumbs scorch fast. Set the pan 4-5 inches from the element rather than directly beneath it, and turn once.
- French toastHere this means bread dipped in beaten egg and milk, then fried or griddled; sweetened breakfast versions were also current by this date, so the savoury context is what settles it. Cut into fingers or triangles and keep it unsweetened so it reads as a savoury base.
- Béarnaise is assumedNo sauce recipe is supplied. Reduce white wine vinegar with minced shallot and tarragon, strain, then mount egg yolks and warm butter over gentle heat; it will break if it gets hot enough to scramble. Make it last and hold it barely warm.
- YieldThe recipe specifies neither a number of slices nor a number of servings. Reckon roughly 5-6 oz of liver per person and scale accordingly.
Liver appears often in the invalid-cookery chapters of early twentieth-century cookbooks, and for a documented reason: after Minot and Murphy's work in the mid-1920s, a diet of raw and lightly cooked liver became the standard clinical treatment for pernicious anaemia, and liver was also pressed on convalescents generally as a "blood-building" food. What is unusual here is the dressing-up. Sickroom food was normally deliberately plain, yet this entry gives buttered crumbs, fried egg-bread and a bearnaise -- a restaurant sauce of shallot, tarragon vinegar and butter-mounted yolks, traditionally credited to a chef at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, though the story is not documented.