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Calf's Liver and Bacon
INGREDIENTS for large dish.-2 lbs. of liver, bacon, pepper and salt to taste, a small piece of butter, flour, 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon-juice, 1/4 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Cut the liver in thin slices, and cut as many slices of bacon as there are of liver; fry the bacon first, and put that on a hot dish before the fire. Fry the liver in the fat which comes from the bacon, after seasoning it with pepper and salt and dredging over it a very little flour. Turn the liver occasionally to prevent its burning, and when done lay it round the dish with a piece of bacon between each. Pour away the bacon fat, put in a small piece of butter, dredge in a little flour, add the lemon-juice and water, give one boil, and pour it in the middle of the dish.
TIME. According to the thickness of the slices, from 5 to 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Calf's Liver aux Fines Herbes and Sauce Piquante. - INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons. A calf's liver, flour, a bunch of savoury herbs, including parsley; when liked, 2 minced shalots; 1 teaspoonful of flour, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, pepper and salt to taste, 1/4 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
CANAPÉS, LOBSTER.
TIME. According to the thickness of the slices, from 5 to 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Calf's Liver, Larded and Roasted. INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons. A calf's liver, vinegar, 1 onion, 3 or 4 sprigs of parsley and thyme, salt and pepper to taste, 1 bay leaf, lardoons, brown gravy. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 10d.
Take a fine white liver, and lard it the same as a fricandeau; put it into vinegar with an onion cut in slices, parsley, thyme, bay-leaf and seasoning in the above proportion. Let it remain in this pickle for 24 hours, then roast and baste it frequently with the vinegar, &c.; glaze it, serve under it a good brown gravy, or sauce piquante, and send it to table very hot.
TIME. Rather more than 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Note. Calf's liver stuffed with forcemeat (see FORCEMEAT), to which has been added a little fat bacon, will be found a very savoury dish. It should be larded or wrapped in buttered paper, and roasted before a clear fire. Brown gravy and currant jelly should be served with it.
Three treatments of calf's liver run together here, and the printed page has suffered: the opening line of the first recipe has picked up stray words from the third, the method for the aux fines herbes version has dropped out altogether, and "CANAPÉS, LOBSTER" is a running head from the top of the column, not an ingredient. The liver and bacon recipe is complete and still worth cooking.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liverCalf's liver wants slices about 1cm (3/8 in) thick and roughly 1 to 2 minutes per side over a good heat, until the surface is browned and the centre still faintly pink. Beeton's 5 to 10 minutes will give you the grey, granular liver that has put generations off the dish.
- Quantities and vesselsA quarter pint is 5 fl oz (150ml) in imperial measure. "For large dish" with 2 lb of liver plus an equal number of bacon rashers serves 6 to 8; halve it for four. Use the widest frying pan you own so the slices are not crowded and steaming in their own juices.
- The pan saucePouring away the bacon fat and starting again with butter and a dredge of flour is a deglazing sauce, and "give one boil" is literal: bring it up, let it thicken for under a minute, pour it out. Scrape the browned residue off the pan base as you add the water, or you lose most of the flavour.
- Lardoons and lardingStrips of hard back fat threaded through lean meat with a larding needle, to keep it moist during long roasting. Modern back fat is hard to buy and the needle harder still; wrapping the liver in thin barding fat or streaky bacon achieves the same end for the roasted version.
- Roasting "before a clear fire"The roasted liver was cooked in front of the fire rather than enclosed in an oven, which is why frequent basting matters. Beeton gives no oven temperature; a moderately hot oven, around 200C/400F, is the usual modern substitute, and a whole calf's liver is likely to be past its best well before Beeton's "rather more than 1 hour" is up.
- The 24-hour vinegar pickleThis is a marinade; the acid seasons the meat and affects its surface texture, though its tenderising reach is limited. Keep it in the refrigerator rather than in a cool larder, and discard the liquid after basting rather than serving any of it uncooked.
- "Seasonable from March to October"A note about the veal calendar, not about the liver. Calf's liver is available year-round now; buy it pale pink and fresh-smelling and cook it the same day, as it deteriorates faster than most offal.
- Average cost2s. 6d. is two shillings and sixpence, an eighth of a pound sterling. Beeton priced dishes so a household could budget; the numbers only tell you that liver was then the cheap end of the butcher's counter, which is no longer reliably true of calf's liver.
Liver and bacon is one of the few Victorian offal dishes that never went out of English pub cookery, and the reason is in the method: the bacon is fried first so that its fat becomes the cooking medium, seasoning the liver and supplying the salt and smoke that lean offal lacks. Beeton's household books distinguish sharply between calf's liver, prized as pale, delicate and expensive by offal standards, and the coarser ox liver, and the seasonal note here reflects the spring-to-autumn trade in veal rather than any property of the organ. The two more elaborate versions show the same cut being pushed upmarket for a dinner table of eight: aux fines herbes with a sharp sauce piquante of vinegar and shallot, and larded and spit-roasted whole in the manner of a fricandeau, the classic French braised-and-larded veal cushion Beeton assumed her readers would recognise by name. The concluding note, with forcemeat stuffing and currant jelly, treats liver almost as game, which tells you how far a Victorian cook was prepared to go to make an economical cut carry a course.}