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Planked Beef Liver
Dredge parboiled beef liver with flour, using one piece just large enough for serving required number of people. Fry on one side first, then place on plank cooked side down. Surround with molded cooked spinach and mashed potato, broil.
A plank dinner in miniature, scaled to one portion and built for a convalescent. The whole thing hinges on how long the liver spends under heat: it is already parboiled and fried on one side, so the broiling stage is meant to brown the potato and finish the meat, not cook it through twice.
- The plankA cooking plank is a slab of untreated hardwood, usually oak or hickory, about an inch thick. Season it first by rubbing with oil and heating it in a 300F oven for an hour or so, and oil it again before each use; a dry plank scorches and can crack.
- Broiler heat and positionSet the plank on a sheet pan under a broiler at high heat with the surface about 5 inches from the element. Three to five minutes is enough to brown the potato ridges and colour the surfaces.
- ParboilingDropping sliced liver into simmering water for a minute or two is a step this recipe assumes and one that turns up in cookbooks of the period, to firm it and draw off blood. It is optional now; if you skip it, pat the liver very dry before flouring so it browns rather than steams.
- Trim the membraneBeef liver carries a thin silvery skin that shrinks and curls under heat. Peel it away before dredging, or the slice will buckle off the plank.
- Total cooking timeBetween the parboil, the pan and the broiler, liver is easily overcooked into something grey and grainy. A slice about half an inch thick, fried a couple of minutes on the first side, will need only brief finishing under the broiler; cook it through but no further.
- Molded spinach and potato"Molded" means packed into small cups or timbale molds and turned out, or in the potato's case piped in a border with a star tube. Both need to be hot going onto the plank, since the broiler will not heat their interiors.
- YieldThe instruction to use "one piece just large enough" means the liver is cut to the size of the plank and to the number at table, so the dish scales with the party rather than being fixed at one portion. Figure roughly 4 to 5 oz of liver per person.
Planking was a restaurant flourish that filtered into home cookery in the late nineteenth century, the meat served on the same charred hardwood board it finished on, ringed with piped potato. Its American ancestor is generally traced to planked shad cooked on boards before an open fire along the Atlantic rivers, and by the end of the century the trick had been extended to steaks, chops and whole fish. Liver was long prescribed to the anemic and the run-down, and cookbooks of this period worked hard to make an unglamorous prescription look like something worth eating. The plank, the molded spinach and the piped potato border are all presentation in service of appetite, on the sound theory that a sick person eats what looks like a proper dinner.